The giant crash exposes crypto’s vulnerability

October 14, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on October 14th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Thousands of billions of dollars went up in smoke when the crypto market shook at the weekend. The affected are complaining of market manipulation — but where is the line when it has become a method rather than a crime?

When crypto figure Huang looked at his account over the weekend, nine million dollars had disappeared. It was not a hacker who had been at work, however. It was a trading loss triggered by Bitcoin falling 13 percent. The move came after it appeared that the United States and China were about to escalate their trade war.

13 percent may not sound like much, but the domino effect was considerably larger. Several smaller cryptocurrencies lost around half their value in one fell swoop, and some lost far more. On top of that, many of them were being traded with leverage — where the effect of price movements is multiplied — and suddenly things moved downward very fast.

In total, around 3,600 billion kronor disappeared over a single weekend. That is equivalent to approximately the combined market capitalisation of Investor, Atlas Copco, EQT, SEB, Sandvik, and H&M.

The figures are comparable to stock market losses — but that is where the similarities end. When the cryptocurrency Dogecoin — which started as a joke — falls, one has to wonder how it was priced in the first place.

The underlying value of many cryptocurrencies is nothing more than demand from other buyers. There are no underlying assets, no cash flow or future dividends. It is worth what someone else is willing to pay — neither more nor less. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down. In many respects it resembles a form of gambling more than a stock exchange.

But like an unregulated casino, it is hard to know how fair the playing field really is.

After the weekend’s crash, speculation ran rife that a single short-seller, with a massive bet, had created all the turbulence. The short position — against Bitcoin — was taken just before Donald Trump’s announcement targeting China. Did they know something that had not yet reached the market?

On the stock market, an event like this would be investigated by the country’s financial supervisory authority. Insider trading is something that can result in criminal prosecution. In the crypto market, however, the rules are different.

The way cryptocurrencies are traded does resemble ordinary stock trading — both visually and in how it has been packaged. There is talk of market capitalisations and you can buy “futures” if you want to speculate on whether a given asset will go up or down. In September, Brian Armstrong, CEO of crypto platform Coinbase, wrote that they had made it possible to trade with 50 times leverage. The smallest change then creates extreme swings. But the product was in demand from customers, according to Armstrong.

The analogies are treacherous — not least because trading now often takes place on exactly the same platforms. Services like Robinhood and eToro offer both stock and crypto trading on the same platform. Even on Swedish Avanza and Nordnet it is possible to trade certificates that give three times leverage on a rise in the Bitcoin price. It is not hard to understand that traders can get confused. If it walks like a duck and looks like a duck — is it not a duck?

Unfortunately, it is not. Individuals are free to trade cryptocurrencies at 50 times leverage. It resembles a product that the financial elite buys and sells. But the underlying regulatory framework that is supposed to ensure everything proceeds correctly does not exist.

On the crypto market, market manipulation is more of a method than a crime. One of the biggest sites for creating cryptocurrencies has a name that suggests precisely this: Pump.fun. A so-called “pump and dump” — trying to drive up the value of an asset and then selling everything at a high price — is so common that it is now joked about in the industry.

Was it someone with insider information who set the whole market swaying? We do not know today. And even if we did know, what could we do about it? The market exists in a legal grey zone where nobody really knows what the rules are, and it lacks institutions capable of ensuring fair play.

In the middle of the market are crypto traders who have grown accustomed to prices only going up, and who add yet more leverage to speed up the value development. One small tremor and many suddenly lost everything. The short-seller, on the other hand, closed their position immediately and made around 835 million kronor in profit in a single day.

Did these crypto traders not know they were more like casino gamblers than proper investors? Perhaps. But it is only when you lose that you start thinking about what rules actually apply.

Are they facing their ‘iPhone moment’?

October 9, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on October 9th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

With competitors closing in fast, OpenAI is borrowing its new strategy from Steve Jobs. Now apps are coming to the chatbots. Could it be as big a success as the iPhone?

The video clip has become legendary. Steve Ballmer, then CEO of Microsoft, is asked what he thinks of Apple’s new product, the iPhone, in 2007. The blunt and self-confident Ballmer laughs — almost scoffs — and says it is the world’s most expensive phone, and not something that will attract business customers because it lacks a keyboard.

Ballmer’s prediction aged poorly. But it was neither the price nor the keyboard that proved decisive for the iPhone’s success. It was the apps.

When OpenAI invited developers to its developer day earlier this week, this insight was crystal clear. The company’s new strategy follows the iPhone — and could produce similar results.

If you analyse why the major tech companies ended up where they are today, you can see a couple of common denominators. One of them is trying to become a platform for other companies to develop products and services on.

Look at Ballmer’s Microsoft, whose operating system Windows underpinned everything in the PC era. Facebook’s games in the 2010s — remember Farmville? Today there is Nvidia and its development platform CUDA.

Perhaps the most well known of all is Apple’s App Store. But Steve Jobs’s phone did not launch with an app store — that came later. Jobs wanted to ensure the software experience on the phone was good enough, and so Apple made all the first apps themselves. But even Jobs was eventually bested by the platform strategy. When they opened the doors for developers to build their own apps for the iPhone in 2008, things really took off.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, knows this, of course. Not least because he himself was on Apple’s stage there and then — in 2008 — presenting his then-startup Loopt. At that point he was an app developer. Now he wants to become the platform itself.

Because OpenAI’s lead is diminishing rapidly. ChatGPT is still market leader, but depending on what type of AI use you need, other models are close behind — or sometimes better. Well-funded companies like Elon Musk’s xAI and Anthropic are impressive. The threat from China with DeepSeek and similar models persists. And the biggest of them all — Google — has made great strides with Gemini.

Competing with Google is both expensive and difficult. The search giant has billions from its ordinary business to plough into AI development. On top of that, it has several advantages when it comes to marketing and distribution. Think about how many people visit Google every day to search for something. Today, many of them are met by AI services as a complement to the ordinary search results.

OpenAI has none of these advantages. So they must do something different — compete in a different way. And now they are inviting other companies to appear and function inside ChatGPT.

It becomes like an app inside a chatbot. Want to book a flight? Then you can chat directly with the booking site to find something that suits you. Need a playlist for dinner, you can describe it in ChatGPT, and an app from Spotify creates one for you with the right feel. ChatGPT becomes the interface through which you reach other services.

For now, it is small-scale. But so were the iPhone’s apps at the beginning. There are probably many companies that would prefer to have users on their own services instead. But over time, it is users who ultimately decide how they want things. Today they want their own apps on their phones. Tomorrow it is possible they will want apps inside AI services instead.

The launch makes OpenAI step further ahead on an increasingly competitive AI market. Expect similar launches from competitors in the near future. Because no player can afford to miss out if the AI market goes the same way as much other technological development.

OpenAI is first out. But they will not be the last. Everyone wants to become the platform for AI — with the definite article.

Is all of this just a performance?

October 5, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on October 5th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Vanja Wikström took her trail of followers through life — and led them into her own project World of Alidia. Blaming ignorance and good intentions when many have lost their money sounds, to say the least, naive.

It was a strange time on the internet, that spring of 2021. American artist Beeple auctioned off a digital artwork through Christie’s. Final price: over 69 million dollars. The artwork was a so-called NFT — a digital image with a certificate of ownership — and nothing more than that. The following year, pop star Justin Bieber bought an NFT depicting a bored ape for over a million dollars.

Pop culture had found it. But somewhere around here it turns. The downhill slope begins. And it is precisely at that moment that influencer Vanja Wikström chooses to enter the market with her own project World of Alidia. Rather than showing caution in the face of a young and unstable market, she drags her followers down into the fall with her.

Let us call the plans generously ambitious and high-flying.

But the pair — Wikström and her partner Niklas Malmqvist — do offer a partial explanation in the podcast. This is how Niklas Malmqvist describes the situation: “There was a euphoria in the entire NFT industry, you should know. It was something everyone got caught up in. And we’ve realised that we absolutely got caught up in it too.”

Euphoria is rarely a signal that indicates it is a good idea to put either time or money into something. Nor is it an accurate picture of how the NFT market looked or functioned at that point in time.

Like all creator platforms on the internet, success was concentrated in an extraordinarily small number of projects and individuals, while the vast majority had to make do with the scraps. Compare with YouTube, which has around 69 million video creators. Only one of them is Mr Beast — the man with the most YouTube subscribers in the world, at a full 442 million.

Describing it as euphoria is therefore extremely generous. The NFT market was always going to reward very few, and those few were almost certainly not going to be a Swedish influencer and her partner launching a project as the market was already collapsing.

In June 2022, just before the project launched, the volume of NFT transactions on the major platforms had fallen sharply. The market was more or less stone dead — but World of Alidia continued regardless.

Why did they continue, despite this headwind? The account of what happened differs depending on who you ask. But one plausible explanation is, as always, to follow the money. More than a third of the money that came into World of Alidia went to the pair’s own salaries. The office space and the ME researcher they had promised never materialised. What remains now is a collection of worthless digital images that Wikström’s followers paid good money for.

But the situation raises larger questions about the influencer economy. In the feeds of social media we are now accustomed to “paid partnerships” and other euphemisms for advertising. That is how the business model works. The method for doing it is a kind of fictitious authenticity. It must look genuine to feel credible, even if most people probably know deep down that what they are seeing is advertising.

Is it all just theatre? Is there no responsibility for what influencers try to sell? Can you say anything at all as long as you have some form of discreet advertising label?

Wikström and Malmqvist’s explanations for the failure make it sound as though good intentions are enough, and not much more than that. It sounds, to say the least, naive.

An influencer is never bigger than their followers. The trust that may have taken several years to build can be erased in a very short time.

Unfortunately, the market does not appear to be entirely self-regulating yet.

While influencer Vanja Wikström appears to want to put World of Alidia behind her, she leaves behind followers who lost everything they invested. They probably will not forget World of Alidia quite so easily.

Ek silenced the doubters — and was right in the end

September 30, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 30th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Spotify stands stronger than ever as Daniel Ek steps down as CEO at the start of next year. After 20 years on the throne, the king of Swedish tech is stepping aside. And the outlines of what lies ahead are already visible.

It is a journey without parallel within Swedish tech. And one that stands strong within Swedish entrepreneurship overall.

Spotify has transformed an entire industry and dragged it — often very reluctantly — into the future. In doing so, it has created a stock market success in the United States with a rise of close to 400 percent since the listing in 2018.

When Ek now leaves behind a full year of profitability, the results speak for themselves. It is possible to make money from streaming.

So what are the next steps for both Daniel Ek and Spotify? Those who have followed the company for some time have already seen a preview of how things might unfold.

American title conventions in professional life are something of a mystery to those not accustomed to them. While in Sweden people often make do with being called “chef” — manager — the American titles are considerably longer and more complicated.

Alex Norström — one of the two who will take over as CEO of Spotify — is today “Chief Business Officer” and “Co-President.” His partner Gustav Söderström is “Chief Product & Technology Officer” and “Co-President” as well.

If you could decipher the titles, this leadership change has been in the making for some time. Being chief business officer or chief product and technology officer is not unusual. But being “co-president” means essentially one thing: you are next in line when the top executive steps down. Logically, this succession has been planned since Norström and Söderström were promoted in January 2023.

During those three years, much has happened at Spotify. The share price had been at its lowest point and the company was still losing money. Many wondered whether streaming was simply a boom-era phenomenon after all — inflated by high expectations and billions in venture capital.

It was not. Even if many artists and record labels have had views on how the music economy has developed since streaming became the standard, consumers have voted unanimously.

Today Spotify has over a quarter of a billion subscribers and more than twice as many listeners in total. It is an outstanding — and very rare — global success. And to cement the question of whether Spotify could become a “real” company — one that actually makes money — Ek is leaving with full-year profitability as his final feather in the cap. One can imagine it was particularly satisfying for him to be able to show that to all the naysayers he has encountered along the way.

Spotify as a company today is broader than just music. It is investing in podcasts, audiobooks, and new video formats. It is becoming more and more a media destination with a clear place in everyday life. Competitors like Apple — despite almost infinite financial resources — have not managed to dislodge them from that position.

The challenge for the company is therefore to maintain and develop the strong position it already has. Can they broaden the offering further to make the service so self-evident that it feels impossible to cancel? Can they justify higher prices in markets that are developing rapidly?

There is much to work on, but a revolution is unlikely to be on the agenda. The revolution has already been carried out — and it is the fruits of that revolution that Spotify is now harvesting.

For Ek himself, he can take a step back and devote himself to other things. In practice, Norström and Söderström have already managed most of the day-to-day operations anyway, but now they also get the titles that match the responsibilities. As chairman of the board, Ek retains his association with the company, but his immediate activities will no longer be as closely tied to it.

A little distance may be preferable. Through his investment company Prima Materia, Ek has invested in, among other things, the defence company Helsing. Individual artists such as Massive Attack have protested against this by removing their music from the service. Spotify can manage without a trip-hop band from the late 1990s. But it is an unnecessary distraction for everyone involved. Ek can now devote himself to private investment in new companies without it having to spill over onto the music service.

Daniel Ek is handing over an extraordinary piece of company building to the heirs apparent Norström and Söderström, who now both become “co-CEO.” They are taking over a company that is by far Swedish tech’s most brightly shining star. By market capitalisation, they are around ten times the size of the next Swedish tech company after them.

With such an achievement behind him — and 20 years of work — it is hard to imagine what more one could feel one needed to do to be satisfied. And when you reach that point, stepping down as CEO is the right call.

Daniel Ek is already written into the history books.

Nvidia’s creative scheme has a whiff of dot-com

September 23, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 23rd, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

The world’s highest valued listed company — Nvidia — has an unusual problem. Its biggest customers are buying too much. But the company’s solution is making alarm bells ring.

When Jensen Huang meets his shareholders, it is hard to imagine anything other than nothing but happy faces. With a stock market performance of over 1,200 percent in the last five years, Nvidia has gone from a maker of graphics cards to the centrepiece of the AI boom.

The details of where the revenues actually come from have therefore been a detail that has somewhat slipped into the shadows. A closer look reveals that 85 percent of Nvidia’s revenues come from just six customers. So what do you do with this rather pleasant problem?

Well, Nvidia is helping new customers get up and running. But the method being used is somewhat reminiscent of similar arrangements during the dot-com crash.

Let us look at a deal Nvidia made recently. Data centre company CoreWeave received an order from Nvidia worth 6.3 billion dollars — around 59 billion kronor. CoreWeave is to deliver computing capacity for AI services that Nvidia can then sell on.

That might not sound so strange at first glance. But Nvidia is in effect buying back capacity in the chips it just sold to CoreWeave. Moreover, it is guaranteeing to continue purchasing that capacity until 2032. This means that CoreWeave’s large chip purchases from Nvidia become essentially risk-free. They know they will be paid for the next seven years.

Let us take another similar example. A week or so ago, Nvidia signed another deal to pay around 14 billion kronor to rent capacity from cloud company Lambda. Nvidia wanted to use 18,000 chips from Lambda’s data centres. But all of those chips had recently been purchased from Nvidia in the first place.

There is an additional interesting detail about these two deals. Nvidia is a major shareholder in both CoreWeave and Lambda. Through both arrangements, Nvidia is driving up revenues in companies whose profits it benefits from as an owner.

On Monday came a third variant, this time with a more familiar customer: OpenAI. A full 100 billion dollars is what Nvidia intends to invest in the creator of ChatGPT. But here too the details are somewhat vague — what exactly are they investing? Is it chips or cash? Or some form of credit for data services? Nvidia is also already a part-owner of OpenAI from before. The difference here is primarily the enormous scale of the investment.

The arrangements create a kind of feedback loop. Nvidia is customer, supplier, and major owner — simultaneously.

The reason for the deals is likely the customer mix described above. With such a large share of revenues coming from very few customers, the dependence on them is extreme. If even one of them were to decide to scale back their AI ambitions, it would hit Nvidia directly. It would therefore be beneficial for them if the number of successful chip customers were substantially greater. And a simple way to ensure that a customer grows is to buy services from them yourself.

The deals are not illegal, but they do resemble a couple of controversial business arrangements from the dot-com era.

In 2002, AOL purchased capacity from telecoms company WorldCom. WorldCom in turn bought advertising from AOL for roughly the same amount of money. The result was that both companies looked better on the revenue side without anything of substance actually having happened.

The same year it emerged that Enron — later to become one of the world’s biggest bankruptcies and financial scandals — had done a similar deal with telecoms company Global Crossing. What was really a loan between the companies was restructured to appear as revenue on both sides.

After Nvidia’s almost incredible run of successes, the question has been raised of what could possibly stop the company. The dependence on a handful of individual giant customers is one such thing. That Nvidia has an interest in building up new competitors is therefore logical.

But being on all sides of a transaction — buyer, seller, and owner — is messy and can lead to conflicts of interest. Which role does Nvidia represent when these deals are being negotiated? That is difficult to determine.

Right now everything points to a near-infinite demand for Nvidia’s products and services. The stock has surged over 32 percent — in this year alone. Perhaps Nvidia’s attempts to build up new customers are simply a smart strategy. And not a pitfall of strange circular business arrangements with built-in conflicts of interest.

The world’s stock exchanges — deeply dependent on Nvidia — are at least hoping that is the case.

The timing could be quietly historic

September 16, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 16th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Swedish Sana is being acquired for 10 billion kronor by American Workday. The timing of the deal could prove historically good — is Sana founder Joel Hellermark seeing something no one else sees?

The question every board is currently asking its management team is: what is your AI strategy? And when the answer sounds a little too hollow, it is time to open the wallet. Generously. The fact that American software company Workday is now acquiring Swedish Sana for 1.1 billion dollars — around 10 billion kronor — is one example of that.

The deal gives both sides what they need. Sana gains access to Workday’s customers and the 75 million users it has there. Workday gets an alibi that says it is part of the AI game. But the central element of the deal is the timing. CEO Joel Hellermark has a reputation for having a deep understanding of the AI market. Could what he has seen have been behind the decision to sell?

Despite the incredible hype, it is worth reminding ourselves that AI implementations among larger companies have not yet delivered the big economic numbers. Some areas, such as programming assistance, have shown promising results. AI writing better code is the category most commonly cited by those who have tested it as genuinely useful.

Even so, AI coding tools are areas where AI can be useful but they are not where the biggest economic gains are to be found. Among the futurists, increased economic productivity has been promised. We are talking about efficiencies: employees performing tasks with superpowers, and perhaps fewer employees altogether. For that to happen, large-scale adoption by companies is required.

Sana is operating in precisely that market. The company now offers services to streamline how companies work with internal documents and systems. Keep the IT structure you have, but add AI on top of everything. It is an appealing pitch for many company leaders who may have been worried about the cost this AI revolution might entail.

At the same time, the promise of these efficiencies has not always been delivered. A new survey from the US Census Bureau shows a distinct trend break in how large companies with more than 250 employees have implemented AI. The figure has been falling over the past two months — despite the incredible tailwind the AI trend has been enjoying.

Another study from MIT found that only 5 percent of all new generative AI initiatives were profitable. Ninety-five percent were losing money. That investment in new and immature technology does not pay off immediately is perhaps not surprising. But the figure could dampen enthusiasm among companies that have tested it. It is easy — perhaps wrongly — to write off a technology too early. But it nonetheless becomes a problem for those trying to sell it.

This brings us back to Joel Hellermark and the timing of the deal. Who says no to 10 billion kronor, one might reasonably ask? But someone who has been as deeply embedded in the AI world as Hellermark — and who has seen the momentum his industry has had — could definitely have done so. The former CTO of OpenAI, Mira Murati, had her newly founded company valued at 110 billion kronor straight away. Mark Zuckerberg at Meta is paying billions of kronor to individual employees.

So why is Hellermark selling his life’s work now? Perhaps because he sees something others do not yet see. That it will take longer to get the world AI-adapted than many believe. And that a potential rough reckoning for the entire industry could be a cold shower for everyone participating in it.

In a scenario like that — you get off. You take your billions and dock yourself alongside a giant, listed, and slightly dry company like Workday. The timing for Hellermark and Sana could prove quietly historic.

The artist’s AI career — a worrying sign

September 15, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 15th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

The AI trend is stronger than ever and is pulling the entire American stock market toward new heights. But more and more signals suggest that the top may be near.

“We didn’t see it coming.” The familiar explanation, heard all too often when something unexpected and unwelcome has happened.

In reality, it is rarely quite true. There are signs. Perhaps they were not so clear at the time, or perhaps it was difficult to see the connection between them. But they were there. This is worth keeping in mind when looking at the red-hot AI market.

Three individual events that have recently occurred may not look like much on their own. But could these be exactly the kind of signals you look back on afterward and think you should have seen coming, after all?

Let us start with the first event — an acquisition. Software company Atlassian bought The Browser Company for 5.7 billion kronor. The company made a web browser, Arc, which gained moderate popularity in certain circles of enthusiasts, but never really made a big splash. After that they developed the browser Dia — an “AI browser.” What that means is difficult to answer, since the product has not yet been released to anyone beyond testers.

What we do know is that The Browser Company has essentially no revenue at all. They also barely have any users of Arc, and in any case the company has stated that all energy will go into the new Dia going forward. 5.7 billion kronor for an AI browser that nobody uses sounds instinctively expensive.

Let us look at the next event. Chip company Nvidia — also the world’s highest valued listed company — has also made a peculiar deal. Since February of this year, Nvidia has been a part-owner of cloud company Lambda, which specialises in cloud services and software that facilitate AI models. This is familiar territory for Nvidia, and nothing strange in itself.

The strange part happened last week. Nvidia then signed a deal to pay 1.5 billion dollars — around 14 billion kronor — to rent capacity in 18,000 of Lambda’s chips. But where did those chips originally come from? From Nvidia, of course. They are renting back the very same chips they recently sold to Lambda.

The publication The Information, which broke the story, described it as a “circular financial arrangement.” That sounds like a generous description. Nvidia builds up Lambda’s finances through the billion-kronor deal, but benefits itself both by selling chips to them and by having been a part-owner of the company from the start. This becomes especially clear given that Lambda is reportedly heading toward a stock market listing. Nvidia is now simultaneously one of the company’s largest owners, suppliers, and customers.

Finally, a more pop-cultural observation. In the original gold rush, many people left everything behind for the chance to take part in the promised golden future. It therefore raises an eyebrow or two when American rapper Meek Mill has decided to become an AI entrepreneur. On X he writes that he is working on an “AI tool that will change the world.”

Changing careers is of course a choice open to anyone. But it is unusual for a rapper — one known partly for having been imprisoned for weapons offences — to change course in this particular way. He has a “genius tech guy” with him, so we shall see what the two of them manage to produce.

Let us remember where things stand. The S&P 500 index is at its highest point ever. Nasdaq 100 likewise. According to Goldman Sachs, the companies known as the Magnificent Seven — Apple, Amazon, Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla — had annual profit growth of 28 percent in the most recent quarter. And the American market overall is still going very strongly.

But looking at the other 493 companies in the S&P 500, the equivalent figure is just 6 percent. The tech companies and the AI trend have been an enormous locomotive — but they do not represent the whole economy. A great deal hangs on a very small number of companies, all of whom are deeply rooted in this AI trend in various ways.

Is it a bubble? As we know, you cannot say until after it has burst. But it does look like things are simmering here and there, at least.

Became the world’s richest — there’s a problem

September 12, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 12th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Grand promises about the future just made Oracle founder Larry Ellison the world’s richest man. But the deal that sent the stock soaring is far from certain.

A strange thing happened with cloud company Oracle this week. The figures in the quarterly report were worse than analyst expectations. But the share price did not fall. Instead it surged over 30 percent and made major shareholder Larry Ellison the world’s richest man.

The reason was Oracle’s forecast for revenues from the ongoing AI boom. One example was the contract OpenAI signed with the cloud giant to purchase data services from Oracle for 300 billion dollars over five years. There is just one problem. It may sound straightforward, but it could prove difficult to resolve even for those with billionaire owners.

OpenAI does not have 300 billion dollars to spend. And Oracle does not have the capacity to sell 300 billion dollars’ worth of services either.

The forecast is ambitious, to say the least. Revenues from the company’s cloud services will come in just above 10 billion dollars for 2025. In five years, that figure is supposed to be 144 billion dollars. In total, Oracle announced that customer contracts — for which neither delivery nor payment has yet occurred — grew from 138 billion to 455 billion dollars. The OpenAI deal is included in that figure.

The measure Oracle uses is called “performance obligations” — a form of customer promise within accounting that indicates something will be purchased in the future. For the revenues to materialise, two things are required: the customer must be able to afford to buy, and the company in question must have enough to sell at that point in time.

In the case of Oracle and OpenAI, there is reason to question whether this will happen. The energy alone required to run these data centres is estimated at 4.5 gigawatts, equivalent to roughly four million households. As a comparison, that is slightly less than all the reactors at Sweden’s nuclear plants Forsmark and Oskarshamn combined.

Oracle will also need to invest in substantially more chips from companies like Nvidia. The strong demand — competing with the world’s other major cloud and data centre companies — could drive prices up considerably. And chip deliveries have so far been difficult to guarantee due to high demand.

OpenAI, for its part, faces a major financing challenge. The current plan, according to The Information, is that the company will lose 115 billion dollars — over a thousand billion kronor — between now and 2029. A positive cash flow is not expected until 2030.

Intense negotiations are currently under way with major shareholder Microsoft about how OpenAI’s corporate and ownership structure might look going forward. The aim is partly to prepare the company for a potential stock market listing, which would help with financing.

These are not small challenges on either side. The Oracle-OpenAI deal runs for five years, starting in 2027. Until then, all of this must be resolved.

It is normal for projects of this magnitude to take a long time to plan. We are talking about an investment of around 2,800 billion kronor, after all. That preparations are required is of course reasonable. But despite Oracle not having booked any of these revenues here and now, the share price surged over 30 percent. The market appears to believe the contracts will be honoured and will come to fruition — and is pricing Oracle on the basis of that information.

This is not a property deal or anything similar, however. The predictability and visibility around the AI market even 1.5 years from now — when the contract is set to begin — is murky at best. A number of questions are piling up. What hardware will be needed in AI data centres at that point? Will there be sufficient energy supply? Will Oracle manage to build all of this in time?

And perhaps the most important question of all: does OpenAI — the customer in question — even have the money to pay for the party?

The stock market is currently showing no restraint in its enthusiasm for what AI development can do for these major tech companies. Shares are being traded right now based on high hopes for the future.

But when evaluating a deal of this size, a reasonable starting point is to ask whether the seller is able to deliver the service and whether the buyer can afford to purchase it.

It is far from obvious that the answer is “yes” to both questions.

Forget everything you know — Klarna 2.0 starts now

September 10, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 10th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Klarna opens with a surge on the American stock exchange. Billions in market value are added immediately. But the listing is more of a new start than a finish line.

Sweaty palms, elation, nerves. Putting your life’s work on the stock exchange is a big day for an entrepreneur. That is where Klarna and its CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski find themselves now.

When the opening bell rang on Wednesday, a new era began for Klarna. With the listing in the United States, the Swedish company has left much of its history behind.

On the pink banner hanging outside the New York Stock Exchange, the words read “Pay your way.” The irony in that phrase will likely be lost on most people. “Pay your way” originally means to pay for yourself, and not let anyone else do it. Klarna’s history suggests almost the opposite. But the stock market listing is a new start — and everything that matters now lies ahead of the company.

The start of a stock market journey is not particularly indicative of how things will go forward. In May 2012 it was Mark Zuckerberg’s turn, when his Facebook — now Meta — listed on Nasdaq. There it began with serious technical problems and the trading start was delayed while exchange staff frantically tried to fix them. The chaotic opening was followed by three months of tough trading where the share price almost halved.

If you look at Meta’s historical share price, you see none of that. What must have been an incredibly tough period for Zuckerberg is now a microscopic bump on a curve that shoots upward. Today — around thirteen years later — Meta’s share price is up over 1,900 percent. None of this was readable on that first day on the exchange.

To find the opposite, we need look no further back than this past summer. Design tool Figma had priced its shares at 33 dollars for its IPO in late July. The first trade on the exchange was at 85 dollars. A success! There and then, at least. Just over six weeks later, Figma had lost over 56 percent of its value.

We should therefore view Klarna’s listing with interest, but with caution. An initial increase of 30 percent in the first trade on the American exchange implies a market cap of around 177 billion kronor. But that does not actually say very much. Nor does wherever the share closes in a week’s time. Both the crises and the successes during the company’s first twenty years now form little more than a prologue to what is to come.

The transformation is logical. It is the United States that is the most important market, and that is where growth lies going forward. The many Swedish shareholders in Klarna — mainly among the staff — will likely make their presence felt more in other business contexts than in the parent company itself. A potential wave of investment into smaller startups is one conceivable outcome. That would be good for Stockholm and Sweden. But that is probably where Swedes will mainly feel the effects of this listing.

The success that Sweden has produced in Klarna becomes, in all essential respects, American. The company gains a new shareholder base that will begin to shift when many lockup periods expire in six months’ time. If we look a year ahead, it may be an entirely different type of owner that dominates. But they are unlikely to be primarily Swedish. The company has had international owners and customers for a very long time. The focus moving to the other side of the Atlantic is a natural continuation of something that started long ago. Sweden and the Swedish stock exchange missed that train.

Klarna was founded on 10 April 2005. In many respects, however, it is 10 September 2025 that the world will remember as “Day 1.” Klarna is now traded on the stock exchange and is beginning a new journey with its starting point at the New York Stock Exchange.

It is a new start, whether or not the company feels it needs one. The twenty years that preceded the listing become history. But that is true of every normal company that lists on the stock exchange. The story of the company will be written from here onward.

Siemiatkowski’s zero says it all

September 2, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 2nd, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Boosted by a buoyant market, it is time for Klarna to list in New York. After a turbulent period for the world, a window has opened that Sebastian Siemiatkowski intends to use.

When you’re about to set sail, you do well to check the weather report first.

When Klarna formally submitted its IPO application in March this year, the outlook looked stormy. Then the barometer swung toward a full gale when Trump announced his “liberation day” and the world was thrown into tariff chaos. One can sense that CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski was disappointed, but he took the wise decision to postpone Klarna’s stock market listing.

The world may not be much clearer on tariffs now. But the market is at least more stable. And with competitor Affirm’s strong performance — up over 40 percent on the stock market since the start of the year — there is a clear demand that Klarna can ride. Siemiatkowski is back and ready to list the company in New York.

An extraordinarily long list of investment banks has agreed on a price range that could value the company at over 132 billion kronor. The company is issuing new shares and can raise around 12 billion kronor in new capital. In addition, several major shareholders are selling part of their holdings, with Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen — who owns clothing chains Vero Moda and Jack & Jones, among others — being the largest, intending to sell up to 7.4 million Klarna shares worth almost 2.6 billion kronor.

Among the sellers are major venture capital firms Sequoia, Silver Lake, BlackRock and Abu Dhabi’s investment fund Mubadala. Parts of the management team are also selling shares worth around 200 million kronor.

But the number that speaks loudest is the one next to Sebastian Siemiatkowski’s name in the prospectus: a zero. He is selling no shares at all. As one of Klarna’s largest shareholders, the signal value is enormous.

The venue for the listing was known but says something about Stockholm, Europe, and Klarna as a company. It is the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE, that applies. If Klarna achieves the highest valuation in the range it would give them a market cap just below Telia. Had they listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, they would have immediately become one of Sweden’s largest listed companies.

The idea of listing in Stockholm is not unreasonable. Klarna itself lists Sweden as its most mature market in its prospectus, and it is both where the company started and where its headquarters are today. That in spite of all this they choose to skip the Stockholm exchange says primarily one thing: everything points westward for Klarna.

In recent years, the push into the United States has been the main focus, and that is where growth lies going forward. Klarna choosing New York is logical, but it is a major loss for Nasdaq Stockholm. If the largest and most successful Swedish companies choose to bypass it, that is not a vote of confidence.

The American stock market has moreover been stronger than Europe for an extended period. Financier Christer Gardell has been on the same track, moving holdings from Europe to the United States to reduce the valuation gap that has emerged across the Atlantic. With that knowledge, which corporate leader can justify taking the risk of listing in Europe — at least if the United States is a realistic option?

In both the timing of the IPO and the choice of exchange, Siemiatkowski has demonstrated an understanding of something many entrepreneurs and company leaders have had to learn the hard way: no one is bigger than the macro.

If there is chaos on the world’s stock markets, it makes no difference how good Klarna is as a company. No one will want to hear about it — at least not there and then. And you can write columns of analysis about why European stock exchanges should be able to command the same kinds of valuations for companies as in the United States, but the fact remains that they do not. Macro factors are larger and weigh more heavily than any individual company.

The same applies when it is positive — and the wind is at your back. Indices made up of fintech companies show a strong comeback in recent years. That benefits Klarna now.

Klarna’s roadshow is now getting under way, selling the company and its shares to investors on the market. Within a week or two, the stock with the ticker KLAR will be available to trade on the New York Stock Exchange. It is an impressive piece of company building that Siemiatkowski and his team have achieved together.

A few months ago, that story was in danger of disappearing amid tariff chaos and market anxiety. Let us hope they manage to get out this time — before the world starts shaking again.