Bizarre reason why Jeff Bezos always had one empty chair at Amazon meetings

There are a lot of odd things that Jeff Bezos does, but he’s the second richest man in the world for a reason.

Amazon’s executive chair always made sure to have an empty seat in his meetings, and while it might sound bizarre to you and me, there was clearly method to his madness.

Since founding the company from his garage in Seattle back in 1994, the company is worth a staggering $1,960,000,000,000 – that’s a whole lot of zeros, for those struggling to work it out it is $1.96 trillion.

While he stepped down as CEO back in 2021, and reduced his ownership of the company from 41 percent which he had in 1998 to just 9.56 percent in November last year, he still has an active role to play for the tech giant.

In fact, earlier this year a woman went viral after telling the internet how she was ‘hired on the spot’ after answering two of Bezos’ interview questions correctly.

“Bezos started the interview by promising that he was only going to ask two questions and that the first one would be a ‘fun’ brainteaser’,” Ann Hiatt penned in a CNBC article.

The first was a bit odd, the now-Amazon employee explained that she was asked to estimate the number of panes of glass in the city of Seattle.

Hiatt admitted she was ‘terrified’ by the question at first, but realized that all he really wanted to see was how she broke down a complicated problem into ‘small, manageable steps’.

And so, she quickly put her thinking cap on did some calculations.

Explaining how she came to her answer, she wrote: “I outlined how I would start with the number of people in Seattle, which I thankfully correctly guessed as around 1 million, just to make the math easier.

“Then I said that they would each have a home, a mode of transportation, and an office or school – all of which would have windows. So I suggested that we base the estimate on averages of those.”

After 10 minutes of maths, Hiatt presented her estimate to Bezos.

“That looks about right,” he told her at the time, evidently pleased with her answer.

The second question was simple, the business mogul asked Hiatt about her career goals, and happy with the answer he hired her on the spot.

So what’s with the empty chair at a meeting?

Well, the vacant seat was meant to symbolize ‘the customer’ and it was his way of showing his employees that the customer is the most important person in the room.

Jeff Bezos with his girlfriend Lauren Sánchez (Cindy Ord/MG24/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)

While it sounds pretty cringey from the outside looking in, it clearly worked for him as he’s now worth $204.4 billion, according to Forbes.

An inspiring quote form the entrepreneur explained his thinking.

Bezos said: “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”