THE $ 100bn MAN

That’s the staggering worth of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, who’s just become the world’s richest man. How? By helping kill off the High Street — and filling your home with that mountain of Christmas packaging . . .

You may not know it, but you’ve probably just helped put a big smile on the face of the man who brought toys to children across the world this Christmas. No, not Santa Claus — Jeff Bezos.

Mountains of brown cardboard Amazon packaging in millions of recycling bins are a testament to the labours of his workers, who scurried around in recent weeks helping to deliver everything from the smallest trinket to giant boxes that barely squeezed through front doors.

And the man behind it all has particular cause to thank his customers this year. Bezos, the Star Trek-obsessed founder of Amazon, has just been named the world’s richest person — and our insatiable desire to order goods as cheaply, effortlessly and speedily as possible is surely to thank for it.

According to Bloomberg, Bezos now has a total net worth of $100 billion (£74 billion) — comfortably ahead of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and previous longtime holder of the top spot, on £68.1 billion.

A surge in Amazon’s share price boosted Bezos’s fortune by an astonishing £25 billion in the past year. His empire now includes the Whole Foods supermarket chain and the Washington Post newspaper. It’s fair to say that with his bald head, lazy eye and newly gym-toned physique, Bezos, 53, doesn’t exactly look like Father Christmas. And aside from his firm’s impressive ability to drop presents at our door in a matter of hours, he doesn’t behave like Santa either.

For while Bill Gates — the richest person for 18 of the past 23 years — now devotes his time and money to philanthropic causes, Bezos is infamous among billionaires for being rather less keen on spreading his wealth. He noticeably failed to sign Mr Gates’s pledge encouraging billionaires to give half their wealth to charitable causes.

Given how associates confide that his goal has always been to become richer than anyone else, perhaps it’s not surprising.

BOTH he and his wife, MacKenzie, have come a long way since he started a tiny online bookseller in July 1994. Even the couple’s appearance has changed drastically. Detractors have delighted in contrasting old photos of the 5 ft 8 in Bezos looking like the classic weedy geek with shots taken this summer at the top-level Sun Valley business conference in Idaho.

In those, a shaven-headed Bezos was striding towards the camera in dark glasses and jeans, biceps bulging under a tight black polo shirt and puffer jacket.

His wife, a novelist whose writing critics now rush to praise, has undergone an even more drastic caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation — her current glossy-haired, high- glamour look is frankly unrecognisable from old pictures showing a mousy brunette in brown cardigans.

The power couple — both graduates of Princeton — married in 1993 after the 23- year- old MacKenzie got a job as an assistant at the New York hedge fund where Bezos worked. The latter used to apply his analytical mind even to women, taking up ballroom dancing because he thought it would introduce him to a better class of lady. He boasted about increasing his ‘women flow’ — adapting a banking phrase to mean he was widening the availability of potential partners.

The pair have three sons and a daughter and live in a secluded, 29,000 sq ft, £18.5 million home in Washington state’s millionaire ‘gold coast’ outside Seattle, where Mr Bezos is often seen in a Honda people carrier.

It’s not their only home, needless to say. He recently paid £17.1 million for a vast mansion in Washington DC’s smart Kalorama district, pipping neighbours Barack and Michelle obama to buy the most expensive property in the area.

He also owns a two-acre property in Beverly Hills worth £18.5 million and three inter-connected apartments in the Century building on Manhattan’s Central Park. Together, the flats are worth £12.6 million. Bezos tries hard to make out he’s an ordinary guy at heart. For years after he became super-rich, his wife would drive him to work each day in their 1996 Honda Accord and he’d boast of only paying himself a salary of £57,000 (although of course he earned far more than that).

However, through his holding company, Bezos owns just about the most expensive private jet on the market, a £48 million Gulfstream G650ER. No wonder Bezos is often compared to a Bond villain bent on world domination.

Amazon’s humble origins in his garage in suburban Seattle are the stuff of business school legend. Seeing the internet’s potential as long ago as 1995, Bezos chucked in his New York job and, together with the loyal MacKenzie, packed their stuff in boxes and told their moving company to start taking it west. They’d tell them the precise location when they had found it, they said. His company turned the $300,000 he borrowed from his parents’ retirement fund into nearly $80 million in five years.

But under Bezos’s workaholic culture (staff would sometimes not bother going home) and his ‘Get Big Fast’ imperative, Amazon rapidly expanded into selling CDs and DVDs, followed by toys and electronics. Nowadays, it sells just about anything. In 1996, it had sales of $16 million but within four years Bezos was worth several billion. Amazon is now worth £422 billion, and Bezos owns about 17 per cent of the business.

Market experts still see huge growth potential: a top Wall Street firm forecast last month that the online behemoth may become the first trillion- dollar company, possibly within a year. Even critics Ruthless: Jeff Bezos in July admit Bezos is ‘hyper-intelligent’, a restlessly inventive entrepreneur focused on giving customers what they want and who has ‘a chess grand master’s view of the competitive landscape’. He rarely misses a trick. one day he’ll be snapping up Jeremy Clarkson to make a new version of Top Gear, the next announcing that Amazon will soon deliver by drones.

The problem for his critics is that it appears Bezos — who often sells products at a loss — won’t be happy until he’s driven all his competitors out of business, and High Streets are denuded of bricks-and-mortar shops. Some fear that then, when he has a monopoly, Amazon prices will start to rise.

His tactics with books have been particularly controversial, prompting J K Rowling to accuse Amazon of crippling the industry.

He is similarly ruthless with his 180,000 underlings. Ex-staff have described working at Amazon as like fighting in a gladiator arena, with those who show any sign of weakness or illness shunted out. other workers, however, say that his singular work ethic inspires them to do better themselves.

Bezos also has a volcanic temper. Subordinates have described a bulging vein in his forehead which gives an early warning of an imminent monster tantrum when someone hasn’t come up to his exacting standards. It would be a mistake to suppose his famously hearty laugh denoted a jolly fellow. Biographer Brad Stone describes it as a ‘startling, pulse-pounding bray’, a ‘guttural roar that sounds like a cross between a mating elephant seal and a power tool’.

The fact he often laughs when no one else sees anything funny is disconcerting to his worker bees. Many believe that’s intentional.

SO WHERE does his relentless drive come from? Some say it is to do with feelings of rejection from his childhood. Bezos was three when he last saw his biological father, Ted Jorgensen, a heavy-drinking circus performer who married Bezos’s mother, Jackie Gise, when she became pregnant at 16.

She divorced him after three years, later remarrying a Cuban immigrant, Mike Bezos. The latter, who came to the u.S. with just one word of English — ‘ hamburger’ — imbued in Jeff much of his tireless work ethic. Mr Jorgensen says he would desperately like to just shake his son’s hand, but it’s unlikely: Bezos claims he only thinks of his father when he signs a medical form and has to list his biological parents.

Like other tech tycoons, Bezos (who once played an alien in an episode of Star Trek), has designs on space. He sells some $1 billion of Amazon shares a year to fund his space travel firm, Blue origin. He hopes to take tourists to the moon as soon as next year, and is investing in research to drastically slow down the ageing process.

Bezos ultimately wants to move some of the world’s heavy industry into orbit and perhaps colonise space. Some would prefer him to start cleaning up the Earth’s problems, though — starting with all that wasteful packaging — but it seems unlikely our terrestrial sphere is ever going to contain the ambitions of its richest citizen.