Ingvar Kamprad started his career as a schoolboy selling matches that he bought cheap in Stockholm and sold round his home in the forests of southern Sweden. When he died on Saturday he was the eighth richest man in the world, and Ikea, the business empire he left behind, had graduated from matchsticks to using 1% of all the timber felled in the world. It was a remarkable feat of self-assembly, which has touched the lives of millions of people. At one stage it was calculated that 10% of the children born in Europe had been conceived in an Ikea bed. This extraordinary achievement was distinguished by its apparent ordinariness. Mr Kamprad himself was famously mean with his personal expenses, at least in public, flying economy class and taking the tube to visit his shops. His companies have been at least as stingy when it comes to paying tax since he left Sweden in the 1980s: a report by Green MEPs estimates that the group has dodged €1bn in European taxes in the five years from 2009 to 2014, and the EU is investigating some of the arrangements that made this possible.

The paradoxes do not stop there: he came from a backward part of a then poor country but propelled the world towards modernity; his background and self-presentation were resolutely provincial and Swedish, yet Ikea stands for a completely globalised brand, as much at home in Hong Kong as in Cincinnati or Moscow. The only major markets it has not yet colonised are India and Latin America. He was a convinced Nazi in his wartime adolescence (the Swedish security services opened a file on him before he registered his first company at the age of 17) and even this century praised a Swedish fascist leader as a really impressive person – but one of his closest early collaborators was a Jew whose parents died in Auschwitz. He made immense profits by selling goods for less and less: the most popular Ikea lines are far cheaper now in real terms than they were 30 years ago. His company came to stand in the minds of millions of consumers for the freedom to furnish a home in new and personal ways, but he was ruthless with suppliers and at one stage one of his more popular sofas was assembled by political prisoners in what was then East Germany.

So he was not a saint. In some ways he was more interesting than that. Many of the world’s billionaires have far more obnoxious politics than those Mr Kamprad adopted as an adult. Some must pay even less tax than he managed to do. Ikea democratised a certain style of good design and sold aesthetically pleasing and durable furniture for little more than the cost of materials. Mr Kamprad was not the first to make flat-pack furniture, but he successfully managed to market self-assembly as a deal from which the customer benefited. That was only a small example of his wider skill, which was to make profitable deals that seemed fair to the customer. The ability to present business as a deal from which both sides gain made him one of the greatest capitalists of history.