eff Bezos and Steve Jobs: Both Estranged From Dads and Wild Tech Successes
Jeff Bezos was already among the country's most successful men as CEO of Amazon.com, its largest online retailer. But the billionaire tech mogul can now add membership into an even smaller club of success stories: Those who grew up without their biological fathers.
Among Bezos' cohorts are such American success stories as Steve Jobs, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, all of whom either didn't know or didn't grow up with their biological dads.
According to a profile of Bezos by Brad Stone, published this week by Bloomberg Businessweek, Bezos was adopted and raised by his stepfather as a young child and has not seen his biological father since he was a toddler.
Bezos' biological parents, Ted and Jackie Jorgensen, met in high school and married as teenagers when Jackie became pregnant with Jeff. But the pair split when Bezos was young, and Jackie remarried Miguel Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who helped raise Jeff into the CEO he would become, according to Stone's story.
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Pertman pointed out that the difficulties of navigating one's identity through adoption can be difficult, and often lead to issues in life that impede success. But for some people -- among them Bezos and Jobs -- it can clearly be beneficial or be overcome by a stable adoptive family.
"It's often true that adopted people, because of their sense of loss, that bond that breaks between their original family and their new family, feel more compelled to show that they can do it," Pertman said. "It ties into rejection: 'Am I good enough? Was it because of me? I'm going to show that I'm worthy and good and won't let anything like that happen again.'"
Bezos' story is similar to that of Jobs, whose biological father was interviewed by reporters after Jobs was already a successful adult. Neither Jobs nor Bezos have spoken at length about their biological fathers, but Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have both addressed the difficulties of growing up with absent fathers.
"It's a very strange and almost inexplicable phenomenon that so many of our most prominent political and cultural figures -- Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, John Lennon and Jeff Bezos -- had these unusual or nonexistent relationships with one or both birth parents," Stone wrote in an email to ABC News.
