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BIG BUCKS: Jeff Bezos may not have blinked at his mega divorce settlement, but that’s not the case for most people

JEFF BEZOS, the richest man in the world, has now got to live with ignominy of being known for having had to pay out $35 billion in the richest divorce settlement ever.

But don’t cry for him, Argentina, because he can afford it. He’s worth $151 billion as I write this and, by the time you finish reading this, he’ll probably be worth $152 billion, thanks to contributions from all of us who shop online. Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon, after all.

Ignominy? When you are so eye-waveringly wealthy, you would have thought that ignominy is just a tiny ‘igno’. To paraphrase the late great comedian Frankie Howerd “Ignominy, ignominy, they’ve all got it – ignominy”. At least those whose dignity depends on people not prying into their private life and affairs.

Divorce is a very public indignity for the rich, famous and the high and mighty, and exposes, at the very least, their financial settlement with their ex. But so what, I hear you ask. When you are the shopkeeper to the world, what care you what opprobrium follows?

Ignominy is merely a noun to the likes of Jeff Bezos (and, like I said, a mini one at that). You would have thought so, wouldn’t you? And yet he doesn’t want ‘the most expensive divorce in the world’ tag hanging around his neck for ever and to be on his epitaph. Not when he’s founded the world’s shop. Not when his shop has killed off all the other shops in the world.

Not when he’s richer than everybody in Jamaica put together. He’s got his legacy to think of. He’s got to carefully curate what he will be remembered for. Everyone wants to be remembered for the right reasons. Especially the super-rich.

Don’t get me wrong, I would still rather be in Jeff Bezos’s place. I would still rather have £100 million in the bank and let you lot cuss bad word on me as much as you like. But I wouldn’t divorce my wife. Wait, maybe I said that a bit too quickly. Let me think about it for a minute…

After all, being able to shell out that much money to your ex is a status symbol. It’s like, yeah, I paid her $35 billion to keep her sweet and I didn’t even blink. It takes a REAL man to be able to say, not one bead of sweat trickled down from my forehead as I wrote the cheque out to my ex for $35 billion.

A real HARD man. I’m talking the baddest of the baddest. The hardest man out there ain’t your LOCAL bad man. It’s your GLOBAL bad man. Your local bad man is nyaming hundreds and thousands and acting like it ain’t no biggie. Whereas Jeff Bezos is on another level. If he can sign a cheque for $35 billion to a woman who ain’t even going to powder him no more, HE BAD.

And that’s unfortunate, I ain’t going to lie, that real bad man status is bestowed on those who have nuff disposal income to settle a divorce, squash some beef or make a next man go suchj his selfie.

When you’re talking that kinda cash, we (bruvvas) ain’t in that league. We ain’t real bad men, whatever we may be thinking. We think we’re bad, because we are strong like lions and we’re sweet like honey, but a real bad man is the one who has got all the money. He doesn’t have to be strong like a lion.

He can pay people who are, to have his back. And he doesn’t have to be sweet like honey... Like Ade Goodchild, the bloke who won £71 million on the EuroMillions the other day recognised, it’s his wallet that has suddenly become sweet like honey, not him.

That’s why we don’t do divorce no more. Most middle-class black couples in Britain stick together even when they hate each other’s guts. We simply cannot afford to split the wealth – the equity from the house, the joint bank account and the future earnings.

If we were rich like Bezos, no more than five or 10 percent of us would remain in the marital home with the person we married. Not only because of the seven-year itch. But also because of that old African saying, “There’s only room in a pair of jeans for one husband.”

And with all this Brexit stuff to worry about, not to talk of all the time we fell spend considering who is going to win the League – Man City or Liverpool in the most exciting end to a season in yonks – well, it would be a lot easier if we were single again like we used to be, instead of having to demand the remote control from our wives every time we want to watch Match of the Day.

Now, I don’t know if any of those reasons for divorce were applicable the last time a black man had to settle a divorce with vast amounts of his own cash in this country. It was six years ago when oil tycoon Michael Prest had to pay his estranged wife Yasmin £17.5 million quid. It sounded like a vast amount of cash in those days, and Prest fought tooth and nail not to have to pay it.

Compared to Jeff Bezos, the Prest divorce now looks like chump change. It was, however, significant enough to put off a couple of other wealthy black men in Britain who were about to park their old bang- ers up and replace them with a newer model, but instead decided to keep their old jalopies in the garage and simply lease a new car every now and then.

Generally though, it is black women who earn more than their male counterparts in Britain – stick that in your exhaust pipe and smoke it. So naturally I would not divorce my wife. She’s my rock and anchor. And my pension, should she wish to divorce me.

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