- Jeff Bezos' fiancée recently posted an image of the billionaire using a homemade door desk.
- Bezos created these door desks in the early days of Amazon as a cheap solution.
Jeff Bezos might be a billionaire, but to this day, he still uses a homemade scrappy door desk from Amazon's early days in the 1990s.
The Amazon founder's fiancée Lauren Sanchez posted a photo on Instagram over the weekend, which shows Bezos working from a laptop on the door desk. She also shared an earlier photo of Bezos using a similar-looking, which appears to show him working in the garage of a home he rented at the time of founding the company.
"After all these years … When I walked in on him working this morning, I took this picture," Sanchez wrote in the caption. "I just love that he is still working from one of the first desks that have been around since the beginning."
The door desk was invented by Bezos in 1995, a year after founding the e-commerce giant, according to a blog on Amazon's website. One of the company's first employees, Nico Lovejoy, said Bezos needed to buy desks for the few staff he had at the time, and there was a Home Depot store across the street.
"He 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," Lovejoy said.
Lovejoy said the desks were "scrappy" and "pretty wobbly," and they had to put cardboard underneath the legs to even it out.
"We built door desks because it was the cheapest way we could support a desk. A lot of the things that we do are scrappy by nature. So long as the scrappy solution works," he added.
The door desk has since become a symbol of Amazon's culture and its core value of frugality. A modern version of this design is still used across Amazon offices, the company said in the 2018 blog post.
Netflix's first CEO, Marc Randolph, previously said that Bezos told him that the makeshift desks were a "deliberate message."
"It's a way of saying that we spend money on things that affect our customers, not on things that don't," Randolph recalled.
Bezos stepped down as Amazon's CEO in 2021 and is currently the world's second-richest person with a $184 billion fortune. Bezos and Sanchez spent the summer of 2023 sailing on his $500 million yacht and visiting various destinations.