Jeff Bezos Still Works at the Same $10 Door Desk That Launched Amazon’s Empire

Jeff Bezos may be worth over $190 billion and command one of the largest companies in the world, but one thing in his office hasn’t changed since the 1990s: his desk. Not a designer executive suite or some custom-built power statement. Just a cheap wooden door, mounted on four-by-fours—a makeshift workstation he built himself when Amazon was still a fledgling online bookstore operating out of a Seattle garage.

Left: Jeff Bezos working on the wooden door desk in 1995
Right: Jeff Bezos working on the same desk in 2024

The desk isn’t a relic stashed away for nostalgia. Bezos still uses it.

In Amazon’s early days, cash was tight. Every dollar was stretched, and every decision scrutinized. The company’s first hires needed desks. Buying 50 of them from a furniture store would’ve cost thousands—money Bezos preferred to channel into growth. So instead, he bought cheap hollow-core doors from Home Depot for $10 each and attached legs made from simple 4x4 lumber.

“We built door desks because they were cheap and sturdy,” Bezos later said. “It was an emblem of frugality and innovation” (About Amazon).

As Amazon scaled, raised funding, expanded into new markets, and disrupted global retail, the door desks stayed. Even as executives moved into glass offices and plush boardrooms, many chose—or were encouraged—to keep the bare-bones workstations. They weren’t just functional. They were cultural.

A recent (2024) photo shared by his fiancée Lauren Sánchez showed him hunched over that same rough slab of door, decades after it first supported the earliest blueprints of what would become a trillion-dollar enterprise.

Here’s the screenshot of that post:

The Door Desk as Company Ethos

At Amazon, the door desk became more than a furniture hack. It became shorthand for a specific kind of thinking—lean, focused, and relentless. Bezos himself has cited the desk as a physical embodiment of one of Amazon’s core principles: spend money where it makes a difference to customers, not where it flatters egos.

“It’s not about being cheap,” he told employees at an early all-hands. “It’s about being resourceful and prioritizing what really matters.”

That attitude permeated the company’s DNA. The “Door Desk Award” became an internal honor at Amazon, given to employees who demonstrated the kind of scrappy, inventive thinking that characterized the company’s early survival. The desk was no longer just a surface to work on—it was a corporate north star (About Amazon).

Humility in the Billionaire’s Office

Even after stepping down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021, Bezos has continued to keep the desk close. At a time when some tech moguls flaunt palatial offices and private island retreats, Bezos’s decision to keep working at the same rough-cut slab of wood stands out. It’s not performative modesty—it’s a constant visual reminder of where things started, and how far they’ve come.

Lauren Sánchez’s photo of Bezos at the desk struck a chord with many. In an era obsessed with image, here was one of the richest men alive, still tethered to a $10 door on four posts.

“It’s a symbol,” Bezos said in a 2020 interview, “that no matter how successful you become, you should never forget the scrappy effort it took to get there” (YouTube).

Legacy of a Plank

Jeff Bezos is working on the Door Desk (image via Amazon)

The original door desk now occupies a place in Amazon’s history and identity. And while new hires might get modern setups, the spirit behind that $10 piece of hardware lives on. There are replicas in Amazon’s headquarters, built to remind incoming employees of the kind of thinking that shaped the company.

What Bezos built—on a literal door—wasn’t just a startup. It was a culture rooted in urgency, thrift, and long-term focus. The desk is still there. So is the attitude.

In the world of corporate empires, sometimes the humblest object says the most.