WASHINGTON — Jeff Bezos understands survival instincts.

As a hedge fund refugee, he conjured Amazon, the world’s biggest store, by tapping into our hunter-gatherer instincts, the compulsion to collect more stuff with less effort.

Amazon became “the Prince of Darkness for retail,” Scott Galloway writes in “The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google,” by exploiting our “serious mojo for stuff, as survival went to the cave man who had the most twigs, had the right rocks to crack stuff open with, and got the most colorful mud to draw images on walls so his descendants knew when to plant crops, or what dangerous animals to avoid.”

So, of course, Bezos has finely honed survival instincts himself. This is a season when socialism is chic and billionaires are reviled as lame, immoral, greedy, lying and an Orange Menace (if he’s actually a billionaire). Yet the richest dude on earth has managed to come through a traumatic week inspiring admiration.

He survived a spectacular attempt by David Pecker to ruin him in January with a National Enquirer story revealing his affair with his married neighbor, Lauren Sanchez, a TV personality. It was humiliating for him and his wife, MacKenzie, but Bezos was able to bring his marriage to an end with a modicum of dignity and little apparent damage to shareholder value.