Sitting on the aft deck of his capacious yacht Slipstream, surrounded by high-octane women and Paul McKenna, Simon Cowell chain-smoked his favourite brand of Kool cigarettes while a colonic specialist bleached his anus. "OK," he said languidly. "Let's do something outrageous to make Tom think he's got the inside track on my vacuous life of conspicuous consumption."

"Gosh," said 200 of Simon's closest friends, who had already checked with him that he was happy for them to give Tom carefully scripted quotes. "You really are a one! And such a babe magnet."

"I love chicks, me," Cowell yelled. "Especially airheads with really big tits like Dannii Minogue. I've no idea why everyone thinks I'm gay."

"Us neither," said the 200 friends. "But can we say you're a bit camp?"

An important message from Fox TV interrupted the bonhomie. Cowell's face turned to thunder. "The world is facing the biggest crisis in its history," he announced.

"What's happened?" a flunky asked.

"The first edit of The X Factor shows me with the top button of my high-waisted trousers undone."

Cowell was born into a family of laughter in 1959, and his early years were so staggeringly dull they were of little interest even to his parents. But I've researched it, so tough. After failing at everything, Simon's father got him a job in the record industry where he quickly made a name for himself as the man who turned down Take That. "I was quite down after that," he admits, "and I drowned my sorrows by dating Sinitta. But I dumped her and set about becoming the most important person in crap TV."

"That was a turning point in Simon's life," says everyone who knows their career will be toast if they get a word off-message.

After watching Popstars with growing irritation as its ratings soared, Cowell devised a formula for a completely different show that was to revolutionise global TV and make him an international multi-millionaire celebrity. "The brilliance of Pop Idol was that we told everyone it was groundbreaking when actually it was just Opportunity Knocks," he laughs, while arranging to have his penis cryogenically frozen for posterity.

The success of Pop Idol kickstarted Cowell's long-running feud with Simon Fuller, another spectacularly uninteresting pop impresario. "I was too trusting," says Cowell, while casually dumping his fiancee, Mezhgan Hussainy, for expecting him to play with her rather than himself. "I let Fuller take all the money and credit for my genius and I was determined to get revenge."

This desire to get his own back sparked one of the most important rivalries in the history of human civilisation – not to mention 150 of the most tedious pages in the history of biography, as I forensically analyse every minute detail of Britain's Got Talent and The X Factor while Cowell criss-crosses the Atlantic in his private jet, changing his white T-shirt every time he enters a new time zone. Thanks partly to the efforts of his close friend, Sir Philip Green, by 2011 Cowell had become the greatest man who had ever lived. "He needed help restructuring the finances," says Green, "and whenever I was back from visiting my wife in Monaco, I was able to give it."

There were still bleak moments: 8 May 2011 was one of them. "It was a tragedy for the world," Cowell says. "Worse even than Princess Diana's death. But sacking Cheryl Cole was something I just had to do."

Since then Cowell has gone on to even bigger triumphs and if you're wondering why I haven't bothered to talk to any of the contestants whose lives Cowell has exploited, I leave you with this: would you interrupt a cushy freebie with Simon in the Med to chat to SuBo?

Digested read, digested: The Zzz Factor.