Trump’s golden phone will likely still be made in China

June 17, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 17th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

While Donald Trump tries to get Apple to move iPhone factories to the US, his sons have created an American competitor. But is it even possible to manufacture mobile phones in the US?

A gold-coloured mobile phone, “made in America.”

That is the Trump Organization family company’s new promise ahead of the autumn. The phone is to be sold by the newly launched mobile operator Trump Mobile and is said to cost just under 5,000 kronor. According to the company, the phone, named the T1, will be “proudly designed and manufactured in the USA.”

Donald Trump has among other things criticised Apple for not moving iPhone production to the US. Now his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., as those responsible for Trump Mobile, have the opportunity to show how it would be done. Many critical voices have been raised immediately, asking the obvious question: is it even possible at the moment?

The short answer is: probably not.

A more nuanced answer would be that it depends on how one defines the concept of “manufacturing.” That very question is also at the centre of Trump’s wish to bring more manufacturing industry back to the US. What is he actually referring to?

A mobile phone consists of a large number of different components — screen, memory, camera, battery and so on — which are then assembled to create the phone that is later sold in shops. The individual components are often made by subcontractors. Apple, for example, does not manufacture all its screens itself, but purchases them from companies like LG and Samsung. In that case, manufacturing happens in South Korea.

Looking at batteries, they often come from China, while the storage memory in an iPhone is manufactured in Japan. It is rather like a global construction kit where each part has its own origin.

Then there are the machines required to create each individual component. Dutch ASML, for example, sells lithography machines to Taiwan’s TSMC, which in turn makes processors.

What does “made in America” even mean when the supply chain for a mobile phone looks like this?

Tinglong Dai, a professor at Johns Hopkins business school, described the possibility of doing this in the US to the Wall Street Journal as follows:

“There is absolutely no way to manufacture the screen, source the memory, camera, battery, everything.”

He also added that it would take “at least five years” to set up anything similar in the US.

But let us take the most generous interpretation of the concept of “manufacturing.” We allow all the global subcontractors to stay where they are, but we assemble everything on American soil.

When the Wall Street Journal looked at exactly this scenario for the iPhone, they found that such a move would mean ten times higher costs for Apple. From 300 kronor to 3,000 kronor per phone. It is possible, but it becomes expensive. And that does not even include the cost of setting up this large-scale assembly operation in the US. Factories, machinery and staff are required to make it happen.

Trump’s promised phone is, however, not expensive. It is to cost less than half of what Apple’s latest iPhone costs, but contain components that in many cases are equivalent. The T1 phone is said to have a larger battery and more internal memory than the iPhone. And on top of that, be American.

In autumn, the gold-coloured phone is to go on sale, and only then will we know exactly who is behind each component. But a not particularly bold guess is that it is a Chinese phone at its core, with some minor steps completed on American soil. The Trump family may come to realise that what sounds good as a slogan — “made in America!” — does not always work equally well as a business strategy.

Apple’s silence spoke loudest of all

June 10, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

Apple’s annual event showcased masses of news. But what made the biggest impression was what the company did not mention at all.

If Apple’s annual presentations once resembled a stage performance, they have now become fully Hollywoodified. For many years they were live — now it is a long advertisement film.

Perhaps it is the tech company’s ambitions in television production that have spilled over into the rest of the company? Or perhaps it is easier to conceal obvious holes in the story when the production is flawless. On Monday evening, it was time again.

No event in tech receives the same attention as Apple’s developer conference WWDC — Worldwide Developers Conference. Competitors’ equivalents — Google I/O, Microsoft Build — follow one after another during the spring, but have historically been rather sleepy affairs that have stood in the shadow of Apple.

Having watched a couple of dozen of them, it became clear that Apple’s position at the front of the field is not as well-deserved now as it once was. There is a lack of tension and presence in the presentations. And more than anything else — the innovation that once made the event indispensable for everyone in the tech world is missing.

At last year’s WWDC, AI services were announced that subsequently never had time to be completed before launch. Even today, some of them do not work — something that has led to lawsuits from disappointed customers. Apple did not repeat that mistake this time, barely promising anything in the field of AI, or Apple Intelligence as they call it.

They at least ripped the plaster off immediately and opened with AI. What is the tech world’s undeniably biggest and most important trend was given only a couple of minutes. Roughly equal time was spent showing how one could create dynamic wallpapers — images that move slightly depending on what is happening on the screen. A charming detail, certainly, but it was not for that reason that developers had planted themselves in front of their screens.

Apple is talented when they do what only they can do. The integrated experience between software and hardware — down to the chips — means they can create things their competitors struggle with. One piece of news was giving developers access to the language model that lives locally on Apple’s newer iPhones. By doing so, developers can avoid using cloud services, which easily becomes expensive at high usage. It is also possible to use the service at times when one’s phone has no internet access at all — which in reality is an extremely rare occurrence these days.

Given these conditions — a seamless experience between computers, watches and phones, in-house chips, and an enormous user base engaging with its products for many hours each day — many had hoped for far, far more. What could have been Apple’s own AI services became instead a new design system. New icons and animations that are now uniform across the many products. Again — attractive and pleasant — but neither exciting nor memorable.

Realistically, it will now take another year before anything major in AI can be released. Apple is traditional in this way, following a predefined cycle for its launches. New software is presented in June, new iPhones in early autumn. Then often a single release of computers at the start of the year. That the AI services were late and would not appear this year was admittedly expected, after insiders at the company had leaked information to American media. But the silence around them was probably what spoke loudest of all.

Apple’s top management team has looked almost identical for a very long time. Many of them were there in Steve Jobs’s day. CEO Tim Cook is a steady leader who has made Apple earn extraordinary amounts of money through a well-run portfolio. Some, like the seemingly always-polished Craig Federighi, have acquired cult status among developers. But it is difficult not to wonder whether some fresh blood at the top might have been needed.

Because Apple is in troubled waters — more than in many, many years. They have lost important legal cases involving the App Store, Trump’s trade tariffs are creating uncertainty in manufacturing, and the biggest tech trend — AI — is washing over Silicon Valley and the world like an avalanche.

In that situation, one had hoped to catch a glimpse of the old Apple — the one that could command the world’s undivided attention after a 90-minute presentation. Monday evening delivered many pieces of news — but nothing even close to that.

The clue to what Musk will do next

June 6, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 6th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Is it over between Elon Musk and Donald Trump for good? And what does the fight mean for Tesla? Here we answer four questions about the poisoned situation in the US.

Musk has just stepped down from the assignment of leading DOGE, an initiative aimed at finding savings and cuts within the machinery of government. Shortly afterwards, Donald Trump’s reform package the “Big Beautiful Bill” was passed by the House of Representatives and sent on to the Senate.

DOGE itself claims the organization has so far saved around 180 billion dollars for the American state — figures that have been strongly disputed by many. This, potentially hypothetical, saving was supposed to ease the American national debt. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” would, by contrast, increase the national debt by 2,400 billion dollars, according to independent calculations. Musk’s work with DOGE would thus be completely wiped out — and then some.

Musk called the reform proposal a “disgusting abomination” on X and demanded that it be changed.

According to Politico, the two were to speak on Friday to see if peace could be brokered. Trump himself appeared to torpedo that peace conversation before it had a chance to happen.

Both parties have a great deal to lose from the big fight. At the same time, it was entirely predictable that something like this would happen sooner or later. These are two men with enormous power and ego who at some point were almost inevitably going to end up on a collision course.

That it happened so fast — and escalated so much — was, however, more unexpected. Trump wrote that Musk had “gone crazy” because he removed tax subsidies on electric cars. Musk for his part wrote that the reason the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein has not been made public is that Trump is in it. And all of this happened publicly and openly, on social media.

On Friday afternoon, Donald Trump denied reports that he was to have a phone call with Elon Musk, according to ABC News.

For the situation to be resolved, both parties would need to make some kind of public climb-down. And that is precisely what argues against it happening.

Tesla lost just over 14 percent on the stock market on Thursday as a result of the fight. The company’s share price is, however, volatile, and its investors are used to sharp rises and falls from before. On Friday the share price rose again in New York.

In an ordinary listed company, Thursday’s events would have been a catastrophe. For Tesla, it has happened several times before.

The alliance between Trump and Musk had already been complicated for Tesla before all this. On the one hand, the close association with the world’s most powerful man had brought a great deal of visibility and potential political benefits. On the other hand, many former customers have turned against him and the Tesla brand has suffered.

At the top of Musk’s X profile sits a poll in which he asks his followers “whether it is time to create a new political party in the US that actually represents the 80 percent who are in the middle.” The answer “yes” is leading by a wide margin at the time of writing. The poll does not exactly feel like an obvious overture to a reconciliation between Musk and Trump.

Musk is well aware of the delicate situation he finds himself in, but does not have a history of taking a step back when things get complicated. He has previously transformed both the car industry and space travel. But having the American president as an enemy could turn out to be Musk’s greatest challenge yet.

Kristersson praises a lot — delivers little

June 5, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson says that Sweden has momentum on AI. Good — but it is not thanks to what is happening within his government.

Sweden is to produce a national AI strategy for the years 2025–2030. This could be read on the Ministry of Finance website, which recently published its digitalisation strategy. The AI strategy is not planned to be ready until “early 2026” — that is, more than a year into the five-year period it is meant to cover.

Neither the pace nor the execution inspires confidence. It is a bit like going orienteering and hoping to find a map once you are already out in the forest.

Background material for this delayed strategy is not lacking. The government itself appointed the former county governor Anna Kinberg Batra to investigate AI on their behalf. In addition, Carl-Henric Svanberg was asked to lead a new AI commission with a similar purpose.

Svanberg’s final report was pushed back in time — precisely because it was considered urgent. The report was handed over to the government, which then asked for it to be rewritten as a formal public inquiry. It therefore now sits in consultation with the same kinds of bodies that were already consulted in the earlier report.

Let us also not forget that AI Sweden, a Swedish “partner network” part-funded by Vinnova, shared its AI strategy for Sweden last year. And that as far back as 2018, a “national direction for artificial intelligence” was published by the Ministry of Finance. In it one could read that “if the opportunities of AI are to be realised, Sweden needs to develop its long-term knowledge and skills supply in the AI field.” Where that has gone in the past seven years is unclear.

Despite an abundance of investigations and documents, very little is happening on AI from the government. Mathias Sundin, one of the participants in the AI commission, said the following to Dagens Media:

“The opportunities that exist now will be seized in some other part of the world. In the 1990s we were number one in the world with the internet, and from that came companies like Mojang, Spotify, Klarna and Skype. That kind of thing happens early in a transition.”

It is hard to disagree. While Sweden sends remits and investigations back and forth, the rest of the world is running past us. That might perhaps have been acceptable — Sweden is a small country that cannot be the best at everything. But when Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson praises several private AI initiatives and also speaks of momentum on the AI question, it is still reasonable to ask what this momentum and interest has actually produced from the government’s side.

That list of examples is unfortunately short. But one need not look further than across the North Sea to see how it could work.

As early as 2021, the United Kingdom invested 10.5 billion kronor to establish ARIA (Advanced Research and Invention Agency), an agency for advanced research. ARIA drew inspiration from the American DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a predecessor that contributed to developing technologies including GPS and mRNA. Through its own projects and by funding others, ARIA and DARPA can ensure that important development happens in their respective home countries.

ARIA is not a dedicated AI unit, but its mandate suits the field perfectly. Find and develop advanced technology that benefits everyone — and that in the short term benefits the United Kingdom most of all.

Looking further afield, Saudi Arabia just invested 96 billion kronor in building Humain — a state-owned AI company with the aim of establishing the country as a leader in the field. Saudi Arabia is a large and wealthy country, one might say. Perhaps not a fair comparison for Sweden? So let us look at something at the other end of the scale as well: Singapore. Over the coming five years, even that small Southeast Asian country will invest around ten billion kronor in AI.

And so we come to Sweden. In the spring budget one could see in black and white how the AI question has been prioritised. It amounted to 30 million kronor for the Swedish Tax Agency and 30 million kronor for the Social Insurance Agency. Beyond that, we got a “regulatory sandbox” to avoid immediately having to shut down development in areas where legislation is not sufficiently clear.

Yes, you hear it. The momentum that Ulf Kristersson speaks of is conspicuously absent in Sweden. At least from official quarters. While the countries around us are investing billions, we are spending millions investigating the investigations that have already been done. And if we are lucky, we will get a strategy for the country more than a year after it was supposed to come into force. We can do better.

Up 2,800 percent — is the strategy sustainable?

May 30, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

Donald Trump’s listed company, the games retailer GameStop, and Japanese love hotels. All three have adopted their new strategy from stock market favourite MicroStrategy: borrow money and buy bitcoin. Enthusiasts see a rocket ship — critics warn of a crash.

They are called love hotels. Simple Japanese hotels that can be rented by the hour for a private meeting. They are popular in a culture where many people live at home until they marry.

The company Metaplanet had these as its business idea for many years. Somewhat forgotten on the stock market, the company’s share price barely moved for several years. In 2024, the management decided to change strategy. Now they would buy bitcoin instead. In one year, the share price has surged by over 1,900 percent.

Metaplanet is not alone. When their ordinary business falters, more and more companies are now turning to bitcoin as an alternative. And it all started with a man whose personal fortune fell by around 60 billion kronor after he was accused of accounting fraud.

The central figure behind the phenomenon is named Michael Saylor. He is the founder of the company MicroStrategy Incorporated, which recently renamed itself the more abstract “Strategy.” But it is the name MicroStrategy that has become known among both thousands of retail investors and large hedge funds and institutions.

MicroStrategy was originally a business intelligence company that sold software. The company was listed on the stock exchange in 1998, and just a year later Saylor was named the wealthiest man in Washington DC.

That wealth was short-lived. In March 2000, MicroStrategy announced that the financial results of the previous two years were inaccurate and needed to be restated. The share price dropped like a stone — a full 62 percent in a single day. Saylor had to pay a fine but escaped having to admit that he had done anything criminal.

Fast forward 20 years and Saylor delivers a quarterly report for MicroStrategy, July 2020. The share price that once stood as high as 333 dollars now sits at around 11 dollars. Saylor announces that the company will buy bitcoin using part of its cash holdings, and a month later the company has purchased 21,454 of them.

Neither Saylor nor anyone else could have anticipated that this purchase would lay the foundation for the company’s entire business — and start a trend that would sweep up billion-dollar companies in its wake.

The MicroStrategy model is both remarkably simple and yet difficult to understand. The company sells shares or issues bonds of various kinds to the market. With the money it receives it buys bitcoin. Had the assets it was buying been stable, they would have balanced each other out. But that is not the case with bitcoin, as is well known.

Instead, something very strange has emerged. When MicroStrategy issues a loan for 100 kronor, and then buys bitcoin for 100 kronor, its share price rises by 150 kronor. The numbers are not exact in any way, but they serve as an illustration of the phenomenon. The increased market capitalization means it can issue more loans, buy more bitcoin — and then see the market cap rise again. It sounds strange, doesn’t it? But in five years, MicroStrategy’s share price has risen by over 2,800 percent. The perpetual motion machine keeps spinning.

It surprises no one that the rise in the share price has attracted attention. The list of companies that now intend to copy MicroStrategy is long. Japan’s Metaplanet now has only one hotel left in its portfolio, The Royal Oak Gotanda in Tokyo. It is being converted and will soon be renamed “The Bitcoin Hotel.”

This week, the games retailer GameStop and Donald Trump’s media company TMTG both announced that they will do the same and invest in bitcoin as an asset in their respective companies. For them, however, the share price fell by around ten percent immediately after the news. Is the strategy already beginning to cool?

There is reason to suspect so, at least. The sceptical reader has probably already sensed a hole in the reasoning above. What happens to MicroStrategy and the other companies if the bitcoin price suddenly crashes? Or simply stops rising? Then the company is left with an enormous amount of outstanding debt even though the assets in the business have collapsed. Creditors can then receive shares in the company, but who wants them if the value has crashed?

The short answer is that nobody really knows. A reasonable guess is that it would end badly. The slightly longer answer is that the risk is something one must accept in order to have the chance of the opposite scenario — that the price of bitcoin shoots skyward. Were that to happen, MicroStrategy, as one of the world’s largest holders of bitcoin, would have no problem settling its debts with a comfortable margin. But that this is not a share — or a risk profile — like any other is clear.

With these risks in mind, one might wonder who is actually trading in them. And here another picture of what is happening emerges. The innovation that MicroStrategy has created is, at its core, financial.

The company has constructed a long range of financial products that it sells to various funds and institutions. Since it still has a software product as well — the same idea as 20 years ago — funds that are not permitted to trade in cryptocurrencies can still buy MicroStrategy. There are ETFs (exchange-traded funds) created solely to trade the shares with leverage, meaning with even higher risk. The volatility — which for a retail investor might seem off-putting — becomes, on the contrary, attractive for certain funds with strategies that benefit from it.

The scale is enormous. On certain days this spring, exchange-traded funds built on MicroStrategy have been the most heavily traded securities on the American stock market. And everything rests on the simple thesis that if they raise more money, they can buy more bitcoin. The financial innovation is having created so many types of fund products that they can draw in money from every conceivable institution.

As the money flows into MicroStrategy, the bitcoin price has continued to rise. There is only a certain number in circulation, and there can never be more. That is part of the reasoning behind why the value will continue to go up. And if you believe that the price of bitcoin will only ever rise, you can also accept that MicroStrategy is valued at so much more than its underlying assets. The price is only going up, right?

But everything does not always continue upward on the stock exchange. The more companies that try to copy what MicroStrategy is doing, the more large buyers of bitcoin there are. But if they fail to replicate the same perpetual motion machine with fresh capital, that enthusiasm can quickly reverse.

Should the bitcoin price — for whatever reason — fall sharply, the situation on the ordinary stock market could also become very shaky. Cryptocurrencies have found the back door into the equity market, one could say. And with them, risks at a level that ordinary savers are unaccustomed to.

OnlyFans is more than just a porn site

May 24, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 24th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Controversial OnlyFans may be about to be sold for 77 billion kronor. The platform has become a money machine — with billion-dollar profits and anonymous venture capital behind the scenes. But the biggest winner is a hidden billionaire in Florida.

In a suburb of San Diego, a McLaren sits in the garage. List price for the sports car: around 3 million kronor. Beside it stands a Porsche. The owner of the house lives alone, and feels a little lonely.

“Living alone in a big house is terribly lonely. The bigger the house, the lonelier you get,” he tells GQ. He does not lack for company, however.

CJ Clark is a 21-year-old superstar on the OnlyFans platform. Hundreds of thousands of people follow him across various social media channels, but it is OnlyFans that has paid for the cars and the house.

He is not alone in his career choice. The OnlyFans platform exploded during the pandemic when vast numbers of ordinary jobs disappeared, and time spent at home — often in front of a screen — increased sharply. For many, OnlyFans became an alternative to conventional employment, something that could be done from home despite pandemic restrictions. When society later reopened, the behavior had already taken hold. OnlyFans had become established.

To the uninitiated, the site initially looks innocent. “Support your favorite creators” reads the headline. Other similar services, such as Patreon, have existed longer and become an important income stream for creators of various kinds. This can involve musicians, artists or writers who get their fans to subscribe in order to support the person financially.

OnlyFans also gives the impression of being something similar. A video clip on the site shows two girls brushing a pony in a competition over who can make their little horse the prettiest. The difference is that when you click on the girls’ own profiles, you realize that the content they most often sell is of a completely different nature. It is, in practice, mostly explicit.

The OnlyFans phenomenon is particularly interesting from a Swedish perspective, as it has found itself at the center of a new bill that was just passed by parliament. The proposition is formally titled “Stricter approach to sexual offenses, fraud against the elderly and crimes with gender as a hate crime motive” but it is primarily OnlyFans that the politicians are referring to.

Since parts of OnlyFans will continue to be legal, it now becomes a matter of judgment. If you have paid to watch a video being streamed live and urge the person in front of the camera to do something sexual — then you may be considered a buyer of sex, which is illegal in Sweden. What is new is that it will count as purchasing sex even if the parties involved never meet physically.

The lines around what constitutes a “sexual act” are going to be — to say the least — complicated. How the police are supposed to apply this law is something few seem to understand. But the law was passed by all parties in parliament. An unusual unanimity across the political spectrum.

It is not just about the definition of sex. It is also about extraordinary amounts of money. OnlyFans is no small operation. In 2023, the company’s most recent public financial year, they had over 4 million “creators” and a staggering 305 million “fans” — customers who watch. The service turned over 6.6 billion dollars — around 63 billion kronor in today’s currency — and made a profit of 4.6 billion kronor. The year before, the profit was 3.8 billion kronor. Connecting fans and creators of this nature is evidently like printing money.

The money flows in to more than just the parent company. Eighty percent of revenues are shared with the creators who produce the content. That is how CJ Clark can afford the expensive cars in his garage outside San Diego.

What Sweden is going to criminalize is a portion of OnlyFans’ biggest business — the private content. This is images, video and communications that you do not see as a subscriber, but which are ordered or agreed between both parties. This more private part of the service accounts for fully 59 percent of OnlyFans’ revenues. And it is growing strongly — three years ago, the corresponding figure was just 40 percent.

Calling OnlyFans a porn site is therefore an oversimplification. It resembles more closely a kind of marketplace where buyers and sellers meet. With the difference that it is the seller who is selling herself — or himself — in various ways.

Critics argue that this type of commissioned work should in practice be classified as purchasing sex. If it is a direct order for a sexual service, there is no necessary distinction to be made based on how the service is delivered — digitally or physically.

The site’s proponents point out that unlike conventional porn sites, those who perform these services earn a much higher share of the revenues. Moreover, they have more control as individuals over what they are expected to perform, since the person in front of the camera controls what happens. The porn industry has long attracted heavy criticism on both these points — poor pay and a culture of abuse. The industry has also consolidated significantly, and several of the largest sites are now owned by a venture capital firm with what one might guess is an inadvertently ironic name: “Ethical Capital Partners”.

Unlike the conventional porn industry, OnlyFans has broken through society’s taboo and landed squarely in popular culture. It is now possible to find a long list of celebrities on the platform. And not everyone is selling explicit images either. The British pop star Lily Allen has an OnlyFans account where she sells only pictures of her feet — a niche that is popular with some. The account name “Lily Allen FTSE500” is both a reference to the English word for feet as well as to the well-known London stock index. Allen uses her feet to earn money.

Having an account on OnlyFans, regardless of what is posted there, has therefore become something different from being a porn star. Even if in all material respects it often resembles exactly that. In the prevailing influencer culture, the service has become a kind of business model for monetizing celebrity on social media. For some, they earn substantially more on OnlyFans than through the more traditional advertising collaborations.

As popularity grows — driven by celebrities’ acceptance of the service — it looks as though OnlyFans will continue to expand. But as with most other major internet platforms, it is easy to participate but difficult to become well known. And even harder to become wealthy. Most of the money goes to a handful of individuals at the top of the pyramid, while the rest consists of millions of semi-naked people with high hopes. There are no guarantees that you will earn anything.

The biggest winner of this contemporary phenomenon is, however, no celebrity. On the contrary, it is a relatively unknown man named Leonid Radvinsky. He is the owner of the anonymously named company Fenix International Limited — the company behind OnlyFans. He was born in Ukraine, has the company registered in the United Kingdom, but is said to live himself in Florida.

The service itself is believed to have only around 40 employees, and from 2021 to 2023 Radvinsky drew out more than 9.6 billion kronor in pure dividend payments. Sources tell Reuters that the company may be on the verge of being sold in a transaction that values OnlyFans at around 77 billion kronor.

Not everyone has to undress, then, to get rich on OnlyFans.

Apple can’t find its next iPhone

May 22, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 22nd, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Apple is last among all tech giants when it comes to AI. Internally, they are talking about a crisis. Has Apple lost its capacity for innovation?

A sinking ship. That is how a person from Apple’s AI team describes the situation to Bloomberg. The major AI initiative Apple Intelligence has not gone as expected. Much of the promised functionality has not been released at all. It simply does not work well enough.

Apple is now being sued by users for marketing something that does not exist. The product appears to have been launched far too early. The big question is: why?

Confidence is otherwise Apple’s greatest strength. The company has rarely been the first with new technological leaps, instead waiting until it can release its own unique version. The most famous example is the iPhone, the flagship product that now accounts for roughly half of the company’s revenue. Apple was far from the first with the concept of the smartphone. But when it arrived, it took the world by storm.

That is how it has looked historically. But now a change is becoming apparent.

Let us look at three examples from the company’s many product launches.

In autumn 2012, Apple Maps was released — a mapping service for the iPhone. The maps were one of Tim Cook’s first major launches as newly appointed CEO. The concept was familiar and Google Maps was the clear market leader. But when Apple Maps launched, it automatically became the default choice for all iPhone users. Many could perhaps have lived with that, had the service been as good — or better — than what they were already using.

But Apple Maps was not good. It was so poor that Tim Cook had to go out and apologize to the company’s users. Only many years later did the service become usable and competitive. An embarrassing blot on the record.

Another launch — the most spectacular in recent memory — was the face computer Apple Vision Pro, unveiled in June 2023. The much-discussed product was supposed to represent a new paradigm in computing. But the product was expensive — over 30,000 kronor — and uncomfortable to wear for any extended period. And the most important question of all, nobody could really answer: what was it actually for? To this day, it remains a mystery. An expensive one.

This brings us to last summer, when Apple presented Apple Intelligence — its own AI acronym. Together with partner OpenAI, the intention was to combine the security and privacy of the iPhone with the power of ChatGPT. But what was shown at the lavish presentation did not work in practice. For example, it was promised that you could retrieve your driver’s license number by searching with your voice — a feature that did not exist. Even today, nearly a year later, they have major problems. Among all the tech giants, Apple now sits dead last when it comes to AI.

When it comes to AI, Apple’s vaunted self-confidence appears to have evaporated. Here it has been important to be fast rather than to be the best. Now they are neither. One of the cornerstones — Apple’s voice assistant Siri — was introduced as far back as 2011. It was a technology acquisition that allowed the company to advance its position. But since then, they have fallen seriously behind. As users now expect AI responses — fast and advanced — Siri looks increasingly like a relic from another era.

Internally, they speak of a crisis. The way Apple develops products has not worked in this area, and executive reshuffles and reorganizations have followed one after another. The pace of competitors like Microsoft and Google is substantially higher, in organizations of comparable size to Apple. Compared with the vast ecosystem of AI startups, Apple looks like a dawdler.

Under normal circumstances, the pace would not have been a problem. Apple is a company that has dominated both the stock market and consumers’ wallets when it comes to technology. For much of the world, they have been perceived as overwhelmingly the best, and through that they have built enormous loyalty to the brand. But what is shaking now is internal. Apple is releasing products that seem unfinished — and that the market does not need. Who could not have waited another couple of years for a lighter, cheaper face computer?

For the first time in many years, Apple appears stressed. They cannot find the next iPhone — a new blockbuster that can build future growth. And now AI threatens to upend the way people use their mobile phones.

Being slow and excellent has historically been Apple’s model. There is still time. But being slow and poor is something the market will not accept forever. And that is where Apple is right now when it comes to AI.

The billion-dollar deal could mean two things

May 21, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 21st, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

The world’s hottest AI company is recruiting the man who designed the iPhone. Price tag: 62 billion kronor. SvD’s tech analyst Björn Jeffery answers three questions about what the deal means.

OpenAI has acquired a startup company founded by Apple’s former chief design officer, Jonathan “Jony” Ive. The company is highly secretive but is said to be working on a new type of hardware for AI services. Ive is best known as the designer behind the iPhone and several other Apple products.

The company, called IO, is valued at around 62 billion kronor in the deal. The two entities will now be merged to create a new hardware division at OpenAI, which will be led by Swede Peter Welinder.

In a video, Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman describe having known each other for several years and having worked together on questions about how AI might be used in the future. OpenAI was already a part-owner of IO. Its decision to now acquire the entire company most likely signals two things: rapidly intensifying competition and a promising — still secret — product.

The timing is striking. As recently as Tuesday, Google held its annual developer conference, which shares a name with Ive’s company — IO. There, Google unveiled a cavalcade of AI services designed to show the world that the search giant is one of the leaders in the field. And right in the middle of that conference, Altman acquires a company with the same name. It is a pointed jab from Altman at Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai. The competition is intensifying.

The deal also most likely means that the physical product Ive has been working on is showing genuine promise and could become something sold to the general public — as early as next year, OpenAI indicates in its video.

Bringing Jony Ive into OpenAI is the most significant design hire that can be made anywhere in the world. The fact that the person behind the iPhone is now building a new kind of device for AI will in all likelihood force every other major AI company to plan for something equivalent.

Early attempts at dedicated AI hardware have so far failed. The most prominent was the Humane AI pin — a brooch-like device through which you could talk to an AI assistant. The Humane team also had an Apple background but could not produce a product that was good enough. In February this year the business was shut down and the remnants sold to HP.

The combination of OpenAI with Sam Altman at the helm together with Jony Ive is a powerful offensive move. Expect Google and Apple to assemble equivalent teams where hardware and AI are tightly integrated — if they have not already.

Time for Stenbeck to demand accountability

May 14, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

With a Stenbeck at the helm, Kinnevik’s shareholders have reason to hope for significant change. But her to-do list for turning the company around is worryingly long.

Ambitions, an anonymous portfolio, and a large pot of money. That is the starting point for a scaled-back Kinnevik. At Monday’s annual general meeting, Cristina Stenbeck took over as chair of the family company’s board.

It has been a long time since the company was any kind of power player in Swedish business life. The large historical holdings — Korsnäs, Millicom, Tele2 — have all been spun off. What remains is a sprawling collection of foreign tech companies of varying kinds: health technology mixed with hotel booking platforms and travel expenses software. Why precisely this combination? No one seems able to give a convincing answer.

The common denominator is said to be Kinnevik’s significant engagement and ownership stake — described at the AGM by CEO Georgi Ganev as “almost 15 percent” in the core holdings. That, however, is something of an overstatement. Only one of the five companies actually reaches that level — two of them are even below 10 percent.

Kinnevik has become a small large shareholder. That is unlikely to be a position Cristina Stenbeck is particularly interested in maintaining. The to-do list is therefore long, and will likely keep both the board and management busy for some time to come.

The most important item on that list is to work out what kind of company Kinnevik is supposed to be. Just over a year ago, the then-board proposed distributing 6.4 billion kronor in a special dividend. That was money that came in from the Tele2 sale.

The dividend was no doubt appreciated by shareholders, but the negative signal it sent was significant. How can an investment company fail to find enough suitable, large, or attractive objects to invest in?

The total portfolio consists of 33 relatively anonymous companies.

Giving up and distributing the money suggests a shortage of ideas — or at least that the ambitions are too limited. This is Stenbeck’s first and most important assignment. What is a modern Kinnevik in 2025 and beyond? That is a question current management has struggled to answer for some considerable time.

The next item concerns market confidence. When I speak with people in the venture capital industry, they describe Kinnevik as a rigid and slow partner to work with — a company that acts like a large corporation without actually doing particularly large things. In the most recent quarter they invested 800 million kronor, primarily in three companies already in the portfolio. If you are too slow and formal, it is difficult to work with fast-moving tech companies. More agile venture capital is not in short supply in Sweden or northern Europe today. That competition has intensified considerably.

The third item concerns the existing portfolio. Which holdings have been in focus has shifted during Ganev’s time as CEO. The company Babylon Health, long celebrated as a pioneer in digital healthcare, went bankrupt in 2023. The food delivery company Mathem merged with its Norwegian equivalent Oda but has continued to struggle. In the most recent quarterly report, the company is not mentioned at all.

In total there are 33 relatively anonymous companies in the portfolio. Throughout all of 2024 and so far in 2025, not a single investment in a new company has been made. In 2023 it was only three new companies. The direction in which Ganev wants to steer the holdings is therefore difficult to discern.

Restructuring a company like Kinnevik is not something that happens overnight — especially not during the turbulent years that have passed. But the board’s patience has been more than generous. Beyond a cleanup exercise in which parts of the portfolio have been sold off, and individual top-up investments in existing holdings, it is difficult to identify how far Kinnevik has come in this transformation — or even whether the goal is still relevant, or in anyone’s sights.

Not much has gone right for Kinnevik in recent years. It is the CEO who is responsible for the business — but the board’s most important task is to ensure the company has the right CEO. Now it is Cristina Stenbeck who sits at the helm as the new chair. Reasonably, her accountability begins now.

The utopia could give way to plain capitalism

May 6, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 6th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

OpenAI is forced to abandon its plan to convert to a commercial company. But more interesting is one sentence where the company’s view on the future of AI appears to have taken an entirely new direction.

Elon Musk, modest as ever, explains his relationship to the company behind ChatGPT in an interview on CNBC: “I am the reason OpenAI exists.”

Musk was one of the founders and a major early financier. After that, accounts diverge as to what actually happened at what has become the world’s most important AI company — and more specifically: how OpenAI should be owned and run.

The company has been attempting to convert from nonprofit governance to something resembling a more conventional commercial operation. That process has now been abandoned by OpenAI after running into several legal obstacles. Instead it will now become what is known as a “public benefit corporation” — a kind of hybrid between nonprofit and commercial. Musk sued OpenAI in August 2024 over the restructuring — a lawsuit that continues and is scheduled to reach court next March.

This may sound like a trivial question of corporate governance. But one single sentence in OpenAI’s blog post hints at something considerably larger.

“Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure — which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI player, but not in a world with many good AGI companies — we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone holds equity.”

“A world with many good AGI companies”? That small phrase implies something of a minor revolution.

AGI — artificial general intelligence — is the definition of when AI technology is as capable as, or more capable than, a human being. The debate about whether this would ever happen — and if so, when — has been going on for a long time.

What OpenAI is now writing makes it sound more like a question of how many companies will manage to develop AGI simultaneously — rather than whether anyone will do so at all. Given that the company has spent so much time reshaping its corporate structure in recent months, it could also suggest that AGI is closer in time than many had assumed. Does OpenAI know something the rest of the world does not?

What they describe would mean that several AI systems simultaneously surpass human capabilities, with competition emerging between them. Utopia gives way to ordinary capitalism. OpenAI accordingly concludes that it is not viable to own such technology within a nonprofit structure. Competition in AGI may demand enormous investment.

The situation raises further questions. Some researchers and advocacy groups have previously warned of the risks posed by uncontrollable AI systems. In 2023, the major AI companies were urged to pause their development to avoid arriving at such a scenario. The result has been almost precisely the opposite: an enormous acceleration on multiple fronts, in many parts of the world simultaneously.

At the same time, companies making safety their defining concern have also emerged — including the new company from OpenAI’s former co-founder and research chief, Ilya Sutskever. The company is called “Safe Superintelligence Inc,” which may be considered about as explicit as a name can get.

If AGI lies in our near future and will be developed by several different companies, one must consider how these operations should best be financed and owned. The argument from Elon Musk lies also in the name — OpenAI was designed to be a nonprofit that would be open and accessible to many. That is how important and groundbreaking the technology was already considered when the operation started in 2015.

Ten years later, we may now find ourselves in a situation where several of the world’s largest companies privately own what could be the technological breakthrough of the century — AGI. Technology’s equivalent of penicillin.

That there is money to be made in this space is obvious. Considerably less obvious is what happens when these enormous financial rewards push development faster and faster between competing companies. What happens when the technology outpaces those who are developing it? Nobody can answer that question with any certainty today.