Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos may own superyachts and mansions, but at work he’s still parked behind a desk made from a cheap wooden door, as a symbol and a matter of principle.

Bezos still works at a door-desk, a habit dating to 1995, when Amazon was an online bookseller. As chronicled in a Fox News report from early 2024, talk of the old desk resurfaced when his then-girlfriend and now wife, Lauren Sanchez, posted a photo showing him at the same type of makeshift workstation.

The original design was cost-cutting. “We happened to be across the street from a Home Depot… [Bezos] looked at desks for sale and looked at doors for sale, and the doors were a lot cheaper, so he decided to buy a door and put some legs on it,” recalled early employee Nico Lovejoy in a company blog post.

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By 1999, Amazon was public and Bezos a billionaire, holding roughly $10 billion in Amazon stock, according to The New York Times. Yet the company still used door desks. In a “60 Minutes” profile that year, he told CBS’s Bob Simon the bare-bones setup carried a message. “It’s a symbol of spending money on things that matter to customers and not spending money on things that don’t,” he said.

Upgraded door desks still sit in Amazon corporate offices and fulfillment centers, according to a 2018 CNBC report and Amazon’s own history of the furniture. Frugality is written into Amazon’s leadership principles, which say, “Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention.”

The door has also become a trophy. At all-hands meetings, Bezos has handed out miniature signed replicas, the “Door Desk Award,” to teams that find cost-saving ideas.

The symbolism fits with a broader Bezos playbook, which finds mention in Amazon.com’s garage-to-giant origin story to his “Day 1” mantra and advice on resisting conformity. Even as his net worth has climbed into the hundreds of billions of dollars, the door desk remains in view, reminding employees that thrift is meant to start with the customer.

Photo: Shutterstock/Photo Agency

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