In 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a 17-year-old girl gave birth to a son. The school administrators had told her she couldn't finish high school. She pushed back anyway.
Her name was Jacklyn Gise. And the baby she was determined to raise would one day become one of the most influential people on Earth.
Being a pregnant teenager in 1960s Albuquerque wasn't just difficult — it was scandalous. When Jacklyn tried to return to school after giving birth, the administration told her no. She didn't accept that answer.
"I pushed back and I kept on pushing back," she would later recall. "Eventually the school relented."
But there were conditions. She couldn't talk to other students. She couldn't eat in the cafeteria. She had to arrive and leave within five minutes of the bells. She agreed to all of it. And she graduated.
Her marriage to her son's biological father, Ted Jorgensen, didn't survive. They were both teenagers when they married. He struggled with alcohol. They divorced before Jeff was even two years old.
Suddenly, Jacklyn was a single mother with no money. She found work as a secretary, earning $190 a month. It was barely enough to afford rent. She couldn't even pay for a telephone. Her father rigged up a walkie-talkie system so she could check in with her parents every morning at 7 a.m.
"That's how we were able to stay in an apartment," she later explained. "Because I didn't have to pay for a phone."
Determined to continue her education, Jacklyn enrolled in night school. She chose her classes based on which professors would let her bring her infant son to class. She would show up with two duffel bags — one filled with textbooks, the other with cloth diapers, bottles, and toys to keep baby Jeff occupied.
It was in one of those night classes that she met a young Cuban refugee named Miguel Bezos. He had arrived in the United States at age 15, fleeing Castro's regime with almost nothing. They fell in love.
Mike, as everyone called him, adopted Jeff and gave him his name. Together, Jacklyn and Mike built a home where hard work, education, and big dreams were the foundation of everything.
Jacklyn never stopped learning. Even after putting her college dreams on hold to raise her family and support Mike's career, she went back. In her late thirties, she enrolled again. She was relentless. At age 40, Jacklyn Bezos finally earned her college degree.
"When I graduated from the College of Saint Elizabeth at the age of 40," she said, "I had never been more proud of myself."
Then, in 1995, her oldest son came to her and Mike with a proposal that sounded risky. Jeff wanted to quit his stable Wall Street job to start a company selling books on the internet. Most people had barely heard of the internet. Almost no one was shopping on it.
He told his parents there was a 70% chance the company would fail. They invested anyway.
Jacklyn and Mike put approximately $245,000 into their son's startup. It was an enormous leap of faith. If Jeff was right about the odds, they would lose everything.
The company was called Amazon.
By 2018, that investment had grown to approximately $30 billion.
But the money was never the point for Jacklyn.
Jeff Bezos has spoken publicly about his mother countless times. He called her story "incredible." He credits her not just for the financial investment, but for the foundation she built — the values she instilled, the example she set, the sacrifices she made when he was too young to understand them.
Jacklyn Bezos never sought the spotlight. While her son became one of the most recognizable people on the planet, she worked quietly behind the scenes. She co-founded the Bezos Family Foundation, donating hundreds of millions to education and health causes. She championed opportunities for young people, especially those who faced obstacles like she once did.
She passed away in August 2025 at the age of 78, after battling Lewy body dementia.
Elon Musk on building his first startup Zip2
In 1995, when he was just 23 years old, Elon dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program in physics to start Zip2 with his brother Kimbal Musk.
Elon personally wrote the first national maps, directions, yellow pages and white pages on the Internet that summer in C with a little C++.
In this CBS interview, a 27 year old Elon describes living in a $200/month office with a leaky roof:
“We found that an office was actually cheaper than apartment in Silicon Valley and we got this dinky little office that had a leaky roof. It was just the nastiest place you could imagine. I lived in it too and showered at the YMCA. This lasted for about three or four months, and the reason we chose this office — in addition to it being really cheap — was that there was an internet service provider on the floor below. So we were able to get really cheap internet access by drilling a hole in the floor and connecting to their server directly.”
In February 1999 — less than a year after this interview — Compaq would purchase Zip2 for $307 million in cash.
The interviewer also asks Elon what he thinks the future of the Internet will be, to which Elon responds:
“I think the internet is the superset of all media. It is the be all and end all of media. One will see print, broadcast, radio — essentially all media — folding into the internet. What the internet amounts to is it’s the first two-way communication medium that is intelligent. It allows consumers to choose what they want to see, when they want to see it.”
In 1961, a man with an 8th-grade education picked up a pencil in his prison cell and accidentally changed American history forever.
Clarence Earl Gideon was nobody special. At 51, he was a drifter with gray hair, weathered skin, and a lifetime of hard luck. He'd bounced from town to town doing odd jobs, barely scraping by, occasionally spending time in jail for minor offenses. He never finished school. He never had money. And on August 4, 1961, when he stood in a Florida courtroom accused of breaking into a pool hall, he didn't have a lawyer.
The evidence against him was razor-thin—someone claimed they saw him near the Bay Harbor Pool Room around 5:30 AM with coins in his pocket. Five dollars in change was missing from the building, along with some beer and soda. That was it. Gideon swore he was innocent, but who was listening to a poor drifter with a criminal record?
When his trial began, Gideon made what he believed was a simple, constitutional request: "Your Honor, I request this court to appoint counsel to represent me in this trial."
The judge's response was polite but devastating: "Mr. Gideon, I am sorry, but I cannot appoint counsel to represent you in this case. Under the laws of the State of Florida, the only time the court can appoint counsel to represent a defendant is when that person is charged with a capital offense."
Think about that for a moment. The American legal system—with all its complexity, its procedural rules, its technical language—was asking a man who never finished middle school to defend himself against trained prosecutors. They expected him to understand evidence law, cross-examine witnesses, and protect his own constitutional rights.
Gideon tried his best. He questioned witnesses. He proclaimed his innocence. But how do you defend yourself when you don't speak the language of the law? The jury found him guilty. On August 25, 1961, Judge Robert L. McCrary sentenced him to the maximum: five years in Florida State Prison.
Most people would have given up. But Clarence Earl Gideon wasn't most people.
In the prison library, surrounded by law books he could barely understand, Gideon began to read. Slowly, painfully, he taught himself about the Constitution. He discovered the Sixth Amendment's promise of "assistance of counsel." He learned about the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process. And he realized something that burned in his chest: the system was fundamentally broken.
How could justice exist when rich defendants got lawyers but poor ones faced prosecutors alone?
Gideon filed a petition with the Florida Supreme Court. They rejected it without comment.
So he picked up his pencil again. In shaky handwriting on prison stationery, across five hand-printed pages with imperfect spelling, he wrote a petition to the United States Supreme Court. He signed it. He folded it. And on January 8, 1962, one poor prisoner's voice reached the highest court in America.
Against every odd imaginable, they listened.
The Supreme Court receives thousands of petitions every year. Most are dismissed without a second glance. But something about Gideon's case struck a chord. On June 4, 1962, they agreed to hear his appeal. And because he couldn't afford an attorney, they appointed him one of the finest lawyers in the country: Abe Fortas, who would later become a Supreme Court Justice himself.
On January 15, 1963, Fortas made an argument so simple it was devastating: If Clarence Darrow—perhaps the greatest criminal attorney in American history—hired a lawyer when he was charged with a crime, how could a man with an eighth-grade education possibly defend himself?
The answer was obvious. He couldn't. Nobody could.
On March 18, 1963, the Supreme Court announced its decision: 9 to 0. Unanimous. Justice Hugo Black, who had been arguing for this exact outcome for over twenty years, wrote the opinion. The Court declared that the right to counsel was "fundamental and essential to a fair trial."
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