Tesla’s solution is everyday business in the US

August 13, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on August 13th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Tesla’s Swedish conflict with the union got the most American ending imaginable. It should be a warning bell — more tech companies may follow that do not accept the Swedish model.

After more than a thousand days on strike for some of those involved, the conflict between IF Metall and Tesla is over.

It probably didn’t turn out quite as either party had imagined. But in the end the solution was very simple: it came down to money. Tesla bought the remaining IF Metall-affiliated employees out of their jobs, and so there was no one left who could strike.

The dispute — and the resolution in particular — shows how tech companies choose to go their own way in the Swedish labor market. Tesla may be first here, but they will not be last.

How can you even argue for years about something so uncontroversial, from a Swedish perspective, as a collective agreement?

To understand that, you have to go back to how Tesla started. They were not a car company that needed to be electrified. It was a blank sheet of paper. Every preconceived idea about how a carmaker should look and function had to be reconsidered. The factories, the sales channels, the customer offering — everything was new.

You’ve heard it before. Tech companies that will turn the world upside down by questioning everything. But in Tesla’s case they did precisely that — and pulled the rest of the auto industry into electrification at a rapid pace.

They earned that position by playing by their own rules. There are strong unions in the American car industry too. But none that hold an agreement with Tesla specifically.

Conflicts, on the other hand, there are plenty of. Tesla has had legal disputes with both German and American unions over questions similar to the ones IF Metall struck over. If Tesla had given in in Sweden, it would have carried much wider consequences for the carmaker around the world. If Sweden can, why can’t we? That Tesla would suddenly back down was therefore always highly unlikely.

The solution — buying out every employee connected to IF Metall — is highly unconventional, but pragmatic. It ended with a price tag, in kronor and öre, for simply making the problem go away. In Sweden many experience this as a shock. In the US it is everyday business. There, legal conflicts most often end with some form of settlement in which one party pays the other.

Reaching for your wallet to get your way is thus standard. The difference here is that Swedes — and unions in particular, perhaps — consider the Swedish model so unique that it cannot be circumvented in this simple way. But apparently it can. For a practiced rule-breaker like Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, it is a complete non-issue.

At best, the aborted strike can serve as a warning bell for Sweden and other naive parties. There is a long line of American tech companies present in Sweden that are used to entirely different methods, working practices and conflict management. When they come here to invest or build data centers, they are not primarily interested in fitting into the Swedish system. On the contrary — challenging the establishment is the approach Silicon Valley holds highest of all. They want to run their businesses in whatever way suits them best.

At worst, and this is the more likely scenario, this is the first of many similar disputes. If an American company can buy its way out of a three-year strike with one of Sweden’s largest unions, what other institutions and principles can it get around? There is no shortage of money. The market value of these companies is counted in trillions of dollars.

You can also imagine that quite a few Swedish tech companies are watching this with more envy than disgust. Whatever their origin, the methods behind tech companies are very similar. Grow fast and solve the problems along the way. A union conflict can be exactly that kind of problem — one that now carries a clear price tag. Pay, and move on.

Seen from that perspective, this settlement may have been expensive for Tesla — but those who will pay the highest price are the Swedish system.

The American methods are on their way in. And they work — evidently — perfectly well.

For Silicon Valley, Sweden is a bargain

July 20, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on July 20th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

American tech companies are buying Swedish electricity, luring Swedish entrepreneurs and moving Swedish companies to the US. Politicians and the business community applaud. But as more and more ends up in American hands, Sweden may pay a high price.

Benjamin Dousa seems very pleased.

“OpenAI opening an office in Stockholm is proof of Sweden’s position as one of the world’s leading technology nations.”

In a press release, the Moderate minister for international development cooperation and foreign trade gets to welcome the large American AI company to Sweden’s capital.

He is not alone in receiving them with open arms.

Industry organizations, politicians and entrepreneurs seem touchingly agreed that the AI company’s newly opened branch is proof of Sweden as a major tech nation. In the cheering, everyone appears to overlook that OpenAI opened an office in Madrid as recently as the week before, and that they are hiring just as many people there as in Stockholm. Four.

At the same time as there is talk of how important Swedish and European independence from the US is, there are few things interpreted as positively as American interest in Sweden.

Because the interest is certainly there. The Americans are coming to build data centers with Swedish electricity. To invest in Swedish startups. And to open Swedish branches of large American corporations.

But there is another way to look at it, too.

A kind of colonization of Sweden is under way, driven by American tech companies.

And we applaud while it happens.

Gabriel Vasquez has been to Stockholm nine times in a year.

“There’s no time to be lazy!” proclaims the venture capitalist from the American heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16Z.

There is business to be done here.

Sweden — and Stockholm in particular — has many new and promising entrepreneurs to offer. Vasquez, who was visiting for a conference in the spring, is just one example of the many Americans who have come to town to charm them.

In a short space of time A16Z has invested in a number of Swedish startups, among them Pit, Endra and Dentio. All are newly founded companies in the AI field that have made headlines because of their investors.

The Americans are visible among the very fastest-growing Swedish companies as well.

The venture capital firm Accel has invested in the vibe coding rocket Lovable, and the chip giant Nvidia took part in the funding of the AI legal platform Legora.

The development is received with open arms — from entrepreneurs and the establishment alike.

“When we had decided to build Pit, [A16Z] were the first ones we called. They moved extremely fast. We didn’t really need the money, but we wanted the strongest partner — and that’s what we got in A16Z,” said Fredrik Hjelm, co-founder of both the newly started Pit and the e-scooter company Voi.

A well-known founder like Hjelm probably had many options, Swedish ones among them. But this time the choice was American.

Pit was already prepared for this, having a parent company registered in the US — in Delaware, to be precise. Having one tends to be a requirement from American investors.

And there are particular reasons for that.

In the event of a sale or a listing of the company, the profits — and any taxes — will end up right there, in the slightly sleepy state just south of New Jersey.

It is a good way off before anything like that happens to the newly started Pit, though.

For Swedish Lovable, whose current valuation is rumored to be around 113 billion kronor, it lies somewhat closer. They too have their holding company registered in Delaware.

They have around 250 employees today and 70 open positions. The majority of these sit in Stockholm, something CEO Anton Osika has said he is proud of. These are jobs — with employees who pay tax — that exist here and now.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Osika is asked why the head office remains in Stockholm. He mentions that people rarely quit, and the access to skilled staff, as two major factors. Osika says Lovable can become the biggest magnet for talent in the city.

What he strangely does not mention is the pay level. Which is one of the principal reasons American venture capitalists are so enthusiastic about having Swedish employees in their portfolio companies.

Swedish employers often complain about how expensive it is to have staff in Sweden.

Compared with Silicon Valley, it is a bargain.

In California you have to state salary ranges in job advertisements, which creates good transparency about what different positions cost. Look at a role that both Lovable and Californian Anthropic are currently hiring for — “analytics engineer” — and the American position sits at between 275,000 and 370,000 dollars a year. On top of that come options and similar instruments that can be worth many times more. But if we look only at the base salary, that would correspond to a monthly wage of around 200,000 to 300,000 kronor.

That is eight times higher than the median salary in Sweden.

Lovable does not state what it pays in wages, but the union Sveriges ingenjörer writes that a graduate engineer with ten years of experience earns on average between 50,800 and 65,200 kronor a month. Even at the top of that range — with employer social contributions and everything else included — it is nowhere near the American costs. Not even if you add an AI bonus for working at one of Swedish tech’s hottest companies.

What is taking place, then, is a wage arbitrage. American investor money goes to Swedish salaries. Which in turn go back to create value for American holding companies. It spins off a little tax in Sweden along the way, but the largest values end up outside the country’s borders.

The raw material — Swedish tech talent — is refined by another country.

There are more raw materials of American interest in Sweden. Swedish electricity, for instance.

In Luleå sits one of Meta’s data centers, running entirely on hydropower from the Lule river. In 2018 it expanded and was to become one of the world’s largest at the time.

They are not alone. As recently as June this year came word that Google is building a data center in Horndal, just outside Avesta in Dalarna. 100 permanent jobs are promised when it is finished, in fields from electricians to catering.

Microsoft’s data centers outside Staffanstorp, Gävle and Sandviken have been there for some time. Other players such as Swedish Ecodatacenter supply services to many American customers.

Why all this interest?

The AI expansion around the world has not only created enormous demand for chips and components — there is also a shortage of electricity. It is not enough to build data centers; they also need to be connected to a grid with the capacity to take them. In June last year, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman said we will see a large share of the planet’s energy spent on AI computation.

The question for Sweden therefore becomes not just how many jobs these data centers can generate, but also whether they fit in the electricity grids. And for that matter — what we as a country will not have room for, in favor of the power going to these American data centers.

The electricity that was allocated to the battery factory Northvolt looks set to go partly to a data center instead. The plant that American Lyten bought is not yet running, but the land beside it has already been sold to a data center. And according to the book “Northvoltfallet” by the journalist Gunnar Lindstedt, it is Google that is queuing to move in when it is ready.

The manufacture of green batteries for the vehicle industry was to become a new strategic base industry for Sweden. It remains to be seen whether there will be any batteries at all in the near term. But parts of the grid capacity are already allocated to the data center, so battery production on the scale Northvolt originally planned can never happen.

And if there are any batteries — then it will be Lyten, from the US, that draws the biggest winning ticket. With Swedish electricity and newly built infrastructure as raw material.

While the American investments rain down on the country, Swedish politicians and entrepreneurs cheer. It is seen as an achievement to attract money and attention from companies like Google, Microsoft and Meta. There is talk of momentum for “Silicon Valhalla” — the label meant to market the Swedish tech scene abroad.

But who actually gains most from these ventures?

While some entrepreneurs are very quick to criticize how few Swedish pension funds invest in domestic tech companies, they are just as quick to accept money from American funds for their own startups. And through that they move a large part of the value creation to the other side of the Atlantic. Is that something to be glad about and celebrate?

In other parts of Europe a resistance movement has begun to form.

The European tech initiative Rebuild aims at precisely this. They are trying to identify the European tech companies that exist, and to look at how they can grow without having to give everything up to the US. Over a year they are gathering data and building opinion around the idea that dependence on American tech companies comes with a risk. Can we trust them when we need them?

In mid-June, Anthropic’s latest AI model was suddenly cut off from the outside world because of political decisions. Without resilience, Europe could stand very alone if the winds start blowing differently from the big country in the west.

At Rebuild there is no cheering that the Americans are coming. They are planning for what an internet looks like and works like without them.

At a conference in Copenhagen, Rebuild’s initiator, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, is asked a question in a panel discussion. Why should we care whether things go well for tech companies in Europe or not?

He answers quickly:

“Because it’s our home.”

Perhaps it is no harder than that? To believe that Sweden — or Europe — could cut all ties to American tech companies in the near term would be naive. But it would be equally naive to welcome every initiative as though it were made for Sweden’s benefit. Would we feel the same about them if they came from China, for example?

The new Swedish raw materials in tech — entrepreneurs, tech workers and green electricity — are refined by American shell companies in Delaware.

Is that how we best take care of our common home?

Outside of Sweden’s borders, more and more are starting to answer no to that question.

Hemnet’s crisis is self-inflicted

June 23, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 23rd, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Selling a home in Sweden without using Hemnet was unthinkable just a few years ago. Now the estate agents have revolted, the share is collapsing – and Sweden’s Competition Authority has opened an investigation. What has actually happened to Hemnet?

A newly married couple had an estate agent visiting their apartment in Bagarmossen this spring. They were looking to upgrade, and the apartment was being prepared to go on the market.

“We’ll see if we go with Hemnet, it depends. This is probably the last year we do it,” the agent said.

A Hemnet listing, which was once a given, is now optional. Perhaps even something you can skip entirely. That’s just one of many symptoms of how dramatically the playing field has shifted for the property platform.

Monday brought another: Sweden’s Competition Authority is now investigating the company for abusing its dominant position – after Hemnet tried to create new partnerships with estate agents.

When a company is market leader, the strategy is usually fairly straightforward: make sure everything continues as before. Apple wants people to buy new iPhones, Google wants people to Google. Market leaders benefit from the status quo.

For many years, Hemnet was exactly there. A self-evident and indispensable marketplace for anyone buying or selling property. It was also a paradise for snoopers – “Hemnet-surfing” became a term for people browsing home photos to see how the neighbors had decorated their living room.

But even market leaders can run into trouble.

And for Hemnet’s part, it appears to be largely self-inflicted.

Much of the success – and the subsequent problems – can be traced back to the ownership structure. During Hemnet’s golden years, the service was partly owned by several large estate agency chains. Their incentive to use Hemnet was then crystal clear – Hemnet’s success was the agents’ success. The analysis of the market was also correct: it was better for home buyers to go to one place to search than to navigate around all the different agencies.

In 2015, the Norwegian media group Schibsted (which also owns Svenska Dagbladet) was set to buy a majority stake in Hemnet, but that deal was blocked by Sweden’s Competition Authority. Instead, private equity firms General Atlantic and Sprints stepped in as co-owners. Several of the agencies sold parts of their holdings, with Fastighetsbyrån and Svensk Fastighetsförmedling selling everything. The target was the stock market – and Hemnet went public in April 2021.

When the agents sold, Hemnet’s best partners disappeared from the ownership register. And a new challenge emerged.

On the stock market, you need to show growth. That’s hard to do in a market where you don’t control supply and demand yourself. The volume of homes sold is influenced by many factors, but Hemnet can only control a few. And if you can’t increase the number of properties sold, you have to work with the other variable in the business: price. Listings therefore became considerably more expensive on Hemnet.

“Greed has unfortunately taken over,” said Marcus Svanberg, CEO of Länsförsäkringar Fastighetsförmedling, speaking to Dagens Industri. Without the clear incentive of owning a stake in the service, the agents pushed back and started looking for alternatives.

SBAB had already acquired the property service Booli back in 2015 – at the time a promising search company. It has since grown into a formidable competitor. Booli aggregates property listings in one place and then refers users on to the agencies’ own websites. One might reasonably ask why a state-owned bank is competing with a private company over property listings. Hemnet therefore filed a complaint against the competitor with Sweden’s Competition Authority in January.

This week brought an unexpected turn.

Not only did Sweden’s Competition Authority dismiss the complaint against Booli – they also launched a new investigation into Hemnet itself. It concerns Hemnet’s new partnership with agents around “sell first, pay later,” which the authority describes as “suspected abuse of a dominant position.”

Meanwhile, Hemnet’s share price has only fallen. Since the listing it has dropped over 60 percent, and a full 75 percent compared to a year ago. This despite the company having spent nearly two billion kronor buying back its own shares in recent years. Nobody seems to want to buy this stock right now – except the company itself, which also has approval to buy back a further half a billion kronor.

Falling out with the estate agents has proven costly for Hemnet. Some agents have joined forces to apparently recreate what Hemnet once was – an agent-owned aggregation service called Boneo. There the agents have every incentive in the world to make it fly. The old Hemnet strategy is back, just now as a competitor.

Market leader Hemnet has a long road back to reclaim its position.

Right now, it looks more like a power shift is coming.

Elon Musk’s grand plan is revealed

June 12, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 12th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

SpaceX became world-leading by launching rockets. But now that the company has gone public, it’s something entirely different driving the valuation. That gives a clue as to what Elon Musk is actually building.

In the space industry, you get used to launches. Now the world was waiting for the opposite.

A descent.

In October 2024, in southern Texas at the site now called Starbase, SpaceX accomplished something no one had done before: landing the part of the rocket that had just been launched.

That’s how SpaceX made their name. Enormous technical skill and extraordinary ambitions. But Friday’s stock market listing is, strangely, not about this. And things are likely to get stranger – now that the next phase of SpaceX begins.

Musk’s corporate portfolio has been tidying itself up for some time. In a long series of unusual deals, he has merged his empire, piece by piece.

A clear business logic for all the acquisitions is hard to see from the outside. They seem to have an entirely different motive: Musk wants to consolidate his power in one place.

In October 2022 he bought Twitter, which was subsequently sold to his AI company xAI in March 2025. These two companies then ended up under SpaceX, right in the middle of preparations for the IPO. Together, the banks – with Musk’s cooperation – were able to arrive at a valuation of $1.8 trillion.

How do you justify that? Well, there isn’t much to compare it to. How many other space companies are planning to build colonies on Mars while also selling AI services via data centers in space?

SpaceX is a unique asset. With a uniquely high price tag.

Reading SpaceX’s IPO prospectus, it becomes clear what a transformation the company has undergone in a short time. The part most people associate with them – the space business – is considered the smallest of the markets they are targeting. That market is worth $370 billion. Next come the telecom services via Starlink, the satellite network providing internet to hard-to-reach parts of the world. That market is considered roughly twice as large as the space segment.

Largest of all is the market for AI applications for businesses. SpaceX estimates that to be worth $22.7 trillion – roughly 32 times Sweden’s GDP. But so far, the AI business hasn’t delivered even a fraction of that.

Whether SpaceX’s AI bet will reach its full potential over time is for each person to judge. But given the scale of the operation, it has done something unfortunate: it has reduced the extraordinary achievements in the space business to a side note.

The company’s enormous valuation is based primarily on the potential of AI. Musk has gathered almost all his businesses into one company, and has now successfully taken it public. But it is no longer purely a space company – it is a jumble of Musk’s various interests. Through a kind of alchemy that almost only he can manage, he has pushed up the valuation while keeping control intact.

SpaceX has become a conglomerate for Musk’s own mind and ambitions.

I wrote that Musk has gathered almost all his companies, because for now there is still one major exception: Tesla.

There is strong reason to believe it is only a matter of time before that too is merged with SpaceX into one single giant company.

The companies are already connected in many ways, beyond Musk as their majority shareholder. Tesla is mentioned, for example, 80 times in the SpaceX prospectus. There is both cross-ownership and customer relationships between them. It would be a complex deal under normal circumstances – but it is control of the shares that is decisive. And that control belongs to Musk.

SpaceX’s IPO could have been a milestone and the starting gun for the next generation of space companies. In some ways it still is – the company’s achievements are intact regardless of what happens around them.

But it is hard to escape the fact that Musk’s power ambitions have weighed more heavily than what would have been best for SpaceX as a company. Why would a company that launches rockets and satellites want to own a social network? Or sell AI services?

Engineering has been pushed aside in favor of world domination – and the inflated valuations tied to an AI future. What made SpaceX unique has been set aside in favor of a consolidation of power.

The focus for SpaceX’s next phase will, unfortunately, probably not be about space.

The rocket in Kista: up 2,400 percent

June 9, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 9th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

A small tech company in Kista has suddenly found itself at the center of a global stock market frenzy. The result: a share price increase of over 2,400 percent – and a situation the company may find impossible to manage.

The internet forum WallStreetBets on Reddit became world famous during the GameStop surge. There, ordinary investors banded together to buy shares in the gaming retailer – creating extreme market movements.

Now the same forum has found a new target: the Swedish semiconductor company Sivers Semiconductors.

In a thread about Sivers, you can read the following: “My thoughts [on Sivers] are that I’m up 100 percent and I’m waiting to be 10,000 percent up.”

With expectations like that, it’s hard to surprise positively. Sivers has ended up in a trap that may be very difficult to escape.

The underlying business at the company is like many others on the stock market. They work with advanced technology, and the hope is that a major breakthrough could put real momentum behind the company.

Looking at the share price, it looks as though they’re already there. Over the past three months, Sivers Semiconductors has surged over 2,400 percent. But no obvious breakthrough can be found.

So what is happening – why is the stock surging by thousands of percent?

Last year the company had revenues of just over SEK 300 million, and posted a loss of just under SEK 180 million. That sounds like any other early-stage tech company. It can either become something big, or fall flat at this stage.

The idea that ordinary investors have spotted something in Sivers’ products in photonics and laser technology that others have missed seems unlikely. This is highly advanced technology that is difficult to evaluate.

The information from the company during this period has also been very sparse. By normal stock market logic, there is nothing that could justify this rise. If anything, the opposite – in May the company had to correct its annual report after it turned out to contain incorrect figures. That is hardly the strongest buy signal a listed company can send.

To understand what is going on, you need to zoom out and look at the sector Sivers belongs to.

Semiconductors have had incredible tailwinds on global markets recently. Companies such as Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung – all three enormously larger than Sivers – have also surged lately. These are companies that supply data centers and are strengthened by the prevailing AI boom.

If you missed buying these companies before they took off on the stock market, you might look around for other potential candidates. The trend works in Sivers’ favor – it’s a good time to have the word “semiconductors” in your company name.

This global macro trend is now spilling over onto a small company in Kista.

There is therefore a strong case that Sweden is now experiencing its first major and international meme stock – a stock that appears to be traded primarily on large-scale speculation. Mostly by buyers who are only trading on the momentum the stock has.

Initially, a price surge like this can look appealing. The company gets a lot of attention, and who doesn’t like it when the price goes up?

Someone who took advantage of this was CEO and insider Harish Krishnaswamy, who recently sold his entire holding for just under SEK 100 million. Several other executives are locked up until early August. If the price holds until then, they could become enormously wealthy.

So what do you do when you find yourself in the middle of this whirlwind of new shareholders suddenly flowing in from different parts of the world?

You hold on and hope it continues.

Realistically, there is no story that management can tell about Sivers Semiconductors that is better than the one others are telling for them right now. The share price is completely disconnected from the company’s actual business, and management doesn’t appear to be doing anything to calm the situation either. They even avoid media interviews.

Unfortunately, history shows that these temporary comets on the stock market eventually burn out. And that experience will not be pleasant for anyone.

One can recall another meme stock – the American entertainment company AMC. They too were caught up by individual speculators, causing their stock to shoot up in 2021. They offered free popcorn to shareholders at their movie theaters. At its peak, the share price stood at $238. Today it is $1.8. Shareholders in Sivers Semiconductors would do well to study that journey.

Normally they say the stock market takes the elevator down but the stairs up. Big falls tend to go faster than gains. In this case, Sivers has taken a rocket ship up. And like a rocket, the fall back down will likely be very fast too.

Trying to rebuild the company after such a ride risks being a very, very long staircase to climb back up on the stock market. Even if it was mostly global tailwinds that got it there in the first place.

The best savings tip has become a risk

June 6, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 6th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

The tech boom has changed how you save – even if you haven’t noticed. Now two enormous IPOs could amplify that shift. The best savings advice from years past could suddenly become a major risk.

Warren Buffett wanted to make a bet, but had trouble finding a taker.

The famous billionaire had long argued that ordinary savers were best off putting their money in low-fee index funds. Now he wanted to prove his thesis with a bet that would run for ten years. Could you beat index funds over time?

Buffett found only one person willing to take the other side – hedge fund manager Ted Seides. When the results came in 2017, Buffett had trounced him: 8.5 percent annual returns versus 2.9 percent.

But the safe harbor that index funds once offered is changing significantly. And it’s ordinary savers who are hit hardest.

An index is, roughly speaking, a collection of stocks selected according to specific criteria. You look at things like size, profitability, and the volume of shares available to trade. From that, a selection is made, and some stocks in the index are rotated on a rolling basis.

Each stock’s share of the index normally varies with how its value has developed.

And that’s where something unusual – and risky – has occurred.

Global funds are no longer that global. And broad index funds have become considerably narrower.

Let’s look back ten years, at two different indices: the American S&P 500 (Buffett’s choice in the bet) and the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI). Both are well-known, large indices that can be traded at low fees.

What has happened is an extreme increase in concentration of American tech companies within these indices. In 2016, the seven largest tech companies represented 12 percent of the S&P 500. Today it’s 37 percent. The equivalent figures in ACWI went from 5.5 percent to 20 percent. An enormous increase.

This also means global funds have become much more American. Swedish funds that track various versions of ACWI – such as SPP Aktiefond Global or AMF Aktiefond Global – have seen the share of American stocks in these funds rise from 52 percent to around 63 percent over ten years.

Given the names of both the indices and the funds, this is probably not entirely obvious to all ordinary savers. The funds aren’t doing anything wrong – they are simply following the indices, which have changed substantially.

When major AI companies like SpaceX and Anthropic are heading toward the stock market, this trend could accelerate. Under normal circumstances, it would take a long time before they could enter any index – not least because they are losing money, which can be a disqualifying criterion.

But now both Nasdaq and FTSE Russell have changed their rules to let SpaceX in faster. That would mean these companies, with their enormous valuations, would quickly find their way into many indices – and through them, many index funds and pension funds. The owners of the S&P 500, however, chose to keep their existing rules, which in practice blocks SpaceX for now.

It’s worth keeping the scale of these IPOs in mind. SpaceX will be the largest IPO in history. When Anthropic and OpenAI reach the stock market, a reasonable assumption is that these three companies alone will have a combined value equal to the entire Stockholm Stock Exchange – three times over. And this for three companies that are currently losing billions of dollars every quarter.

When The Economist looked at the numbers, they concluded that SpaceX, at first, would likely represent only 0.1 percent of the S&P 500. No immediate danger there, regardless of what you think of the valuation. But this is only the beginning of these companies’ journey through the indices. The data from the past ten years speaks clearly.

Has Warren Buffett’s savings advice aged poorly? Are index funds still the best option for ordinary savers?

It is, of course, difficult – and presumptuous – to criticize one of the world’s most successful individual investors. Index funds have delivered, and continue to deliver, good returns. But the reason for that in recent years is primarily that American tech giants have gradually taken an ever-larger share of the funds. Is it reasonable that a global fund consists of 63 percent American stocks? Do all ordinary savers understand that when they buy them?

The coming IPOs of AI companies won’t help either.

Listen to Buffett – but keep in mind that the holdings in index funds look substantially different from what they did when his advice was first given. If this trend continues, the risk is that the funds break down entirely.

The Magnificent 7 is a term for seven of the largest tech companies on the stock market: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla.

The sharp warning rings hollow

June 5, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 5th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Anthropic is calling for a global pause in AI development – and pressing on the industry’s most sensitive nerve. But there may be other reasons than concern for the world behind these warnings.

There is no finer way to express yourself in Silicon Valley than to write an essay.

Some have even turned it into a marketing strategy – as AI company Anthropic has.

By writing variations on doomsday essays, they have warned about AI development for many years. And raised hundreds of billions of kronor in venture capital along the way.

Reactions were strong after Anthropic on Thursday called on the outside world, and its own industry in particular, to pause AI development. “It would be good for the world to have the option to slow down or temporarily pause frontier AI development,” two employees noted in a blog post from the company.

The message presses on a sensitive nerve. Is AI becoming a kind of Terminator? Is humanity’s future threatened?

Narratives like these have defined AI development for many years. But it’s worth looking a little more closely at where they come from – and what possible motives may lie behind them, beyond concern for our shared future.

Let’s look at a timeline of what Anthropic has said previously on exactly these questions – and how they have since acted as a company.

I have made a small selection below:

March 2023: A blog post addresses three possible scenarios for the future. In the pessimistic version, Anthropic intends to “raise the alarm” – hoping that institutions around the world would then try to stop AI development. They also write that it may be difficult to notice when the pessimistic scenario kicks in, and that the world should assume that it has until proven otherwise.

May 2023: Anthropic raises 450 million dollars in venture capital from, among others, Google.

September 2023: Anthropic publishes a policy on “responsible scaling” – a framework for “managing catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems.”

March 2024: Amazon invests up to 4 billion dollars in Anthropic.

October 2024: Anthropic publishes guidelines for how governments can reduce “catastrophic risks.”

November 2024: Amazon increases its investment in the AI company to 8 billion dollars.

And finally – the big essay, by Anthropic’s CEO and founder Dario Amodei in January 2026. There he lists, among other things, that AI is the biggest threat to national security in a century – perhaps ever. That jobs will disappear. That AI models exhibit signs of extortion and cheating. And so on.

This could go on, but the point is hopefully already clear. These warnings are regular – yet shortly afterward, their own AI development accelerates with fresh billions in the bank. Despite, apparently, the world being on the verge of collapse.

Accelerate and brake, in turns. It looks a little strange.

In The New Republic in May, a similar tendency was noted. There you can read that it would be “easy to dismiss this as hypocrisy, but the situation is more structurally tragic than that.”

The reasoning was that on the unregulated market that exists, it wouldn’t be possible to stop development even if that was genuinely what one wanted. How would you ensure the stop? What would all the investors say? Would China stop developing AI just because the US chose to do so?

The questions are many. And despite incessant communication about how serious the risks of AI are, they haven’t received any clear – or at least realistic – answer. But positioning their company as a responsible social actor has been an extraordinarily successful strategy for Anthropic.

When the outside world reacts with alarm to these statements, it is worth remembering this context. The underlying anxiety in society seems to search for evidence of its own thesis – and what better than to hear it directly from those driving the development? They are, after all, the experts in the field.

Continuously raising the alarm about risks doesn’t necessarily mean those risks aren’t real. Nor that their concern is being used cynically. But it is a reminder that we seem to have outsourced these questions to a single party – the very largest tech companies in the world – without being able to form a qualified judgment of our own without them. That is an enormous problem we face here and now.

From the outside, it looks as though Anthropic is crying wolf. And like the boy in the famous fable, this creates a situation that ends badly in the end.

Before the wolf arrives for real, it would be better if these questions weren’t driven by someone with a stake in the outcome.

You wouldn’t ask the wolf where to keep your sheep.

But that is exactly what we are doing right now.

Any other answer would have been a shock

June 2, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 2nd, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Is social media harmful to young people? Sweden’s investigators have delivered a much-anticipated answer. Anything other than the conclusion they reached would have been a shock – given how the assignment was framed. But the most important question remains unanswered.

Ask a question, get an answer. The government version of that might be: commission an inquiry, get an inquiry.

When Minister for Social Affairs Jakob Forssmed appointed a special investigator last fall to figure out how an age limit on social media could be implemented in Sweden, the assignment was crystal clear:

“Harmful content and addictive algorithms must be pushed back to strengthen the protection of children’s health, safety, and wellbeing. We are now investigating how a strict age limit on social media can be designed in Sweden.”

The question of whether social media is actually dangerous was set aside in favor of how an age limit could be implemented. But that we still got no answers on in the interim report released Tuesday.

In an op-ed in SvD, the investigators outline their findings. The legal conditions for a Swedish age limit on social media have been reviewed, and the conclusion is that it’s feasible. Legally speaking. A limit of 15 years is proposed. Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube are among the platforms that would be covered.

Beyond that, the investigators were also asked to consider whether this is something that should be introduced at all. That’s a considerably bigger question. And, unsurprisingly, they concluded that the proposal both can and should be implemented.

Any other answer – given how the question was framed from the start – would have been a shock.

Public opinion on this issue is also entirely one-sided right now. As the investigators themselves note, similar proposals are already finalized in several European countries, and there are long lists of ongoing inquiries of the same kind elsewhere. Out in front is Australia, which in December 2025 became the first country in the world to introduce a ban on social media for children.

Bucking that trend would have required enormous courage. And that’s exactly why it’s particularly interesting to look at the reasoning for why this is such a good idea – beyond the fact that many other countries seem to think the same. It’s also worth examining how things have played out in Australia so far, since they’re the only country that has actually implemented such an age limit.

Let’s start with the land down under. In March, a report from the Australian government looked at exactly this. It found that around 5 million social media accounts have been removed. That sounds like a lot. But the report acknowledges that the figure doesn’t correspond to the number of young people who have lost access to social media, since the same person can have multiple accounts. And more importantly – seven in ten children still had social media accounts despite the law.

One of the goals of the age limit was to reduce bullying and harmful behavior through these channels. The Australian report shows, however, that the number of reports has not decreased since the ban was introduced. It’s still early – the law is barely six months old – but so far, the problems appear to persist.

In their op-ed, the investigators write that “the research on children’s wellbeing and their use of social media [is] clear.”

Not all researchers would agree with that claim. Developmental psychologist Candice Odgers at the University of California, Irvine, is one of them.

She has studied young people’s use of smartphones since 2008 and argues that research – including a meta-study examining 226 studies over 12 years – cannot demonstrate any connection between social media use and wellbeing at all. Research from Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski at Oxford University shows similar results. We can see that many young people are struggling, suffering from anxiety and depression. But that social media is to blame is far less clear.

There is, of course, research pointing in the opposite direction too. And that seems to be what Minister Forssmed and the investigators have chosen to focus on. That’s a valid choice – but to say the research is “clear” is a significant oversimplification.

The same thing happened when Sweden’s Public Health Agency issued screen-time recommendations. What was proposed had weak backing in the very research evidence they themselves provided.

One of the biggest questions – even with an age limit in place – is how this would work in practice. How do you even verify users’ ages accurately? The investigators also raise their own concerns about the need to preserve anonymity on social media. But these questions are once again left unanswered. “The inquiry will in its next phase continue to follow that work closely,” the report says, referring to the EU’s work on digital age verification.

Protecting young people is a noble mission that most people can get behind. And few today believe that unregulated tech companies would prioritize young people’s wellbeing. The work is important and affects almost everyone in Sweden.

The real question is how we as a society actually get this right. How we improve young people’s wellbeing without creating other, unintended problems. Or for that matter – whether we can even identify an approach that genuinely works.

This inquiry gave us – once again, and despite good intentions – very few answers on how to do that.

Writers vs AI — the battle is already over

May 29, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

Idealism meets pragmatism as the Swedish Writers’ Union gathers its members for a meeting about the AI future. The mood is set to be tense — but the central conflict has already been partly decided.

It’s not surprising that the tech world is so disliked across large parts of society. Every new technology shift comes with promises of riches and a brighter future — last time it was social media, this time it’s AI.

The riches, however, mostly seem to stay in Silicon Valley. And the broader benefits leave plenty of question marks too. It’s a long way from Google’s Nobel-winning Alphafold project — the AI system that can compute protein structures — to using enormous amounts of electricity to generate strange memes and AI slop.

It’s understandable, then, that Swedish authors aren’t cheering when the conversation turns to their works being included in a new Swedish AI model. The goal is to produce a language model that understands Swedish deeply and that isn’t dependent on American tech companies.

The technology has underdelivered before. When the Swedish Writers’ Union gathers on Saturday to discuss the issue, the mood is set to be sour.

At the same time, there seems to be a misunderstanding both about how the technology and the market function, how they could function — and what’s actually happening right now. Whether you like it or not.

One of the project’s critics, the poet Olivia Bergdahl, tells Aftonbladet: “The way these machines work, it’s the books that get used, but really it becomes more a question of what price tag you put on the language an author has developed — and that’s impossible.”

That may be true. But the price tag on the existing works that have found their way into today’s AI models is already set. It’s exactly zero kronor. So we’re not talking about a situation where authors’ books might end up in AI models — they’re already there. Along with a long list of other copyrighted material that has also ended up there, without permission.

Last autumn, AI company Anthropic reached a settlement in which it agreed to pay 1.5 billion dollars for having used books without permission to train its AI models. The examples are many, and they exist in adjacent industries too. The New York Times, for instance, has sued OpenAI for taking its journalism in a case still working its way through the American legal system.

The conversations the Swedish Writers’ Union is trying to have about a new Swedish language model can be seen in this light. The initiative looks less like a way to embrace AI technology and more like an attempt to step a couple of paces back from where we are today. The aim is to be able to regulate compensation and the use of books in these models under far more controlled terms than what’s happening now.

If this sounds like a kind of hostage situation, there’s a reason for that. American and Chinese companies are currently taking Swedish and foreign literature and training their AI models on it. No one — neither the authors themselves nor the Writers’ Union — has any say in that fact. That obviously doesn’t mean you have to welcome this future with open arms and simply accept it. But to realistically argue for staying entirely outside it, you have to think about how that would actually work in practice. It might mean suing the AI companies in question. But even that is something you’d most likely want to do as a collective rather than as an individual author.

The Swedish Writers’ Union has, thanklessly, ended up taking the blame for this messy AI era. What they’re discussing is participating in a Swedish research project where a different kind of control around compensation and copyright could be built.

If members decide — now or in the future — that they want to fully withdraw from all AI involvement, there’s the option of finding solutions for that too. And if large-scale copyright infringement lawsuits also arrive in Sweden, it might be wise to have a partner who understands how the technology works from the inside.

That holds — unfortunately, you might say — even for those who want nothing to do with it.

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 29th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

A brutal wake-up call for Kinnevik’s portfolio

May 25, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

When Helena Saxon steps in as CEO of Kinnevik, the company’s tech strategy is buried once and for all. A new reality awaits — and some are in for a brutal wake-up call.

When Georgi Ganev, then-CEO of Kinnevik, summarized the year 2021, he wrote the following as the opening line of the quarterly report:

“During 2021, we significantly reweighted our portfolio composition toward younger, private growth companies.”

The mandate for incoming CEO Helena Saxon appears to be the exact opposite. And if you’re a company sitting in Kinnevik’s current portfolio, the future suddenly looks anything but secure.

Reading chair Cristina Stenbeck’s statement in the press release, the new direction is crystal clear:

“We will invest primarily in profitable, cash-flow-generating growth companies where growth capital is scarce and where we can build successful and sustainable businesses across generations.”

If we allow ourselves to paraphrase the somewhat dry quote, we can sum it up like this instead: things at Kinnevik are about to get stable, predictable, and a little boring.

And it’s hard to read the statement as anything other than a repudiation of Kinnevik’s strategy in recent years.

Let’s recall what happened: in recent years, Kinnevik has invested billions in precisely the kind of unprofitable companies that need enormous amounts of growth capital, that haven’t generated a single krona in cash flow, and whose sustainability — and in some cases even their temporary success — has been heavily questioned.

This is a new and inverted strategy.

The market clearly agrees with the verdict. Over the past five years, the stock has fallen by more than 80 percent. Helena Saxon’s previous employer, Investor, has doubled its value over the same period.

Other investment companies on the Stockholm stock exchange haven’t performed as well as Investor, but they haven’t done as poorly as Kinnevik either. With one exception — VNV Global — whose focus has been very similar to Kinnevik’s, with bets on unlisted tech growth companies. The fund Tin Ny Teknik, which pursued a similar strategy, has also lost 57 percent of its value over five years.

If we want to be generous to Kinnevik, we can note that it wasn’t only the execution of the strategy that was the problem — it was the timing too. They were too late to catch the big winners — Spotify, Klarna, King — and they spent too much money on inflated valuations of companies that never lived up to those predecessors.

When it comes to the new generation of AI companies, Kinnevik has put money into Tandem Health — but missed the biggest Swedish winners so far, Lovable and Legora. VNV and Tin Ny Teknik are also absent there.

The big question becomes what happens to the existing portfolio. The list of candidates that can start generating large cash flows any time soon is short. Stenbeck herself writes that they “will be very disciplined when it comes to follow-on investments” and that they will “work with our portfolio companies to maximize each company’s potential and drive positive development.”

But positive development for whom? For Kinnevik, it could just as easily mean selling off these unprofitable holdings. A couple of fintech names were already sold last year, in a deal that short-seller firm Ningi Research criticized. These companies depend heavily on follow-on investments to keep operating. And having a major shareholder that doesn’t want to participate sends a negative signal to new investors.

Selling the holdings to someone else and moving that capital into the new strategy is therefore entirely plausible. But it requires finding buyers. Unlike Kinnevik’s earlier holdings, the names on the list aren’t particularly well known. How about companies like Charm Industrial, Enveda, Nory, Solugen, or Vay? And the ones that have gotten more attention — like Stegra, Aira, and Mathem — have run into serious trouble.

If you’re a Kinnevik portfolio company, you should probably brace for a turbulent stretch ahead. One of your largest shareholders is fed up, and now they’re turning off the money tap.

Looking a year out, several of these oddly-named companies will likely have vanished from Kinnevik’s holdings. Assuming anyone else wants them by then.

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 25th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.