They get more than just money from the state

November 27, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on November 27th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

What happens if Stegra fails? That thought is the company’s strongest bargaining chip right now. Now the state is reaching for its wallet to try to secure the company’s future.

Almost any other Swedish company would have been overjoyed by 390 million kronor. For Stegra, the sum was likely a major disappointment — and considerably less than what they actually needed.

The signal value of the contribution from the Energy Agency may, however, be more important than the money itself. The grant sends a much-needed message to all investors and lenders: the state has not yet given up on Stegra.

It is a complicated situation the company has put itself in. The venture is so large it can be likened to an infrastructure project — something that could affect cities, regions, and the country as a whole.

But unlike other projects of the same calibre, this is being done with private money. In addition to the new contribution, Stegra has admittedly received 1.3 billion kronor in state support. But that figure should be seen in the light of the 72 billion that has come from the private sector. It is a great deal of money in absolute terms, but viewed as a proportion it looks rather meagre.

Whether the state should finance projects of this nature at all is naturally something one can reflect on. There is no shortage of critics of both the idea and the execution when it comes to Stegra.

But when SvD’s Birgitta Forsberg interviewed Pierre-Etienne Franc, CEO of venture capital firm Hy24 and board member of Stegra, he put his finger on a sensitive question. In the interview he says that “Swedish support for Northvolt was not particularly large, and if Stegra were also to fail, that would become a Swedish problem.”

Were Stegra to meet the same fate as Northvolt — regardless of whether the state has financed it or not — it could become a problem for Sweden.

That is, ironically, perhaps Stegra’s best card to play in negotiations over grants and support going forward. One more green failure and an isolated problem suddenly looks like a trend.

Is it no longer possible to run new, entrepreneurially driven industrial projects in Sweden? That is the kind of question one wants to avoid having to answer.

All the parties involved have now created a mildly unhealthy dependence on one another.

Stegra needs continued and expanded financing to keep operating. The financiers — lenders and investors — do not want to bear the entire risk alone, and would prefer to have financing from other sources too. Preferably the Swedish state.

The state does not want to get involved in private projects that could create scandals — but nor does it want Stegra to go under. In particular not in the 2026 election year. That would inevitably splash back onto the Kristersson government as well.

It is against this backdrop that one can view the new 391 million kronor in grants that have now reached Stegra. To TT, Klara Helstad, deputy head of department at the Energy Agency, says that “we have made an independent decision.” That may well be so. But no decision involving hundreds of millions of kronor is made in a vacuum.

In practice, the contribution becomes a much-needed lifeline for Stegra. The state is still in the game, even if not to any great extent. But that signal — that more parties are willing to try to make Stegra work — may be exactly what is needed to secure new funding.

According to the company, 10 billion kronor more is needed. And not a single tonne of green steel has been produced yet.

Things are going incredibly well — for incredibly few

November 24, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

On LinkedIn, people are cheering about “Silicon Valhalla” — the new name for the Swedish tech miracle. But how is it really going? A new industry report reveals quite a few cracks in the facade.

Ask and you shall receive, as they say. The same could be said for the flood of reports that emerge from companies with an interest in telling a particular kind of story.

One such report arrived recently from venture capital firm Atomico, in which they review “The State of European Tech 2025.” And what a surprise — this firm that primarily invests in Europe concludes that things look good for Europe. But anyone who reads the report can also draw entirely different conclusions. Such as that Sweden and Europe as a whole are light-years behind the United States, despite constant cheerleading and new slogans.

We dive into the report’s 282 pages. Here we see, among other things, that Sweden ranks fourth in Europe in terms of the amount of venture capital invested during 2025. Well ahead of countries with considerably larger populations, such as Spain, Italy, or Poland. We have also grown compared to 2024. Things are going well, one might suggest.

A slightly more nuanced way to describe the situation would be that things are going extraordinarily well — for extraordinarily few.

In Sweden, five individual investments in 2025 account for more than 50 percent of all money invested during the year. 223 million dollars went to Lovable and 266 million dollars to Legora. Just those two AI companies account for around 20 percent of all venture capital in tech invested in Sweden during the year.

Looking at the neighbouring country to the east, the concentration is even greater. There, 80 percent of all investments went to just five companies. And more specifically: had Finland not had Oura, the maker of smart rings, the total amount of venture capital in 2025 would have fallen by 900 million dollars — in other words, almost everything.

One of the companies that has contributed to Sweden’s concentration of venture capital is the aforementioned Lovable. The founder of the hyped company, Anton Osika, is quoted in the report saying that “Europe has everything it needs to build companies that last for generations, with values in the trillions of dollars — and we have decided to prove it.”

If Europe has everything we need, it seems strange that Lovable’s parent company is registered in the US, in the state of Delaware. And that, according to Di Digital, it is in the process of establishing the company in both San Francisco and Boston. The purpose is to “get closer to large parts of its customer base” — which is therefore not located in Europe.

Wanting to look across the Atlantic is natural. But then you have to look at the numbers rather than what is written in the text. The opening paragraphs state that “Europe is perfectly positioned to lead — if we choose to do so,” and that the story of Europe is no longer about “catching up” with the US.

The fact that we are no longer talking about Europe catching up with the US has a different explanation, however. We are simply nowhere close to doing so.

One clear example concerns investments and venture capital in tech. In Europe, a total of 33 billion dollars was invested in the category during 2025, up to the end of September. The equivalent figure in the US stands at 177 billion. But what about the growth rate? The increase in Europe is 7 percent. In the US it is 95 percent. You do not need to be a statistician to see where the momentum in this market lies.

In Sweden there is often a predilection for singing our own praises when it comes to tech — the same phenomenon we previously had with music. Could it be a reaction against the overused law of Jante?

“The Swedish tech miracle” has recently been replaced by the phrase “Silicon Valhalla” — a new LinkedIn slogan for a kind of supporters’ club that wants to showcase the momentum they perceive in Nordic tech. Everyone from investors to those whose job it is to monitor and scrutinise the tech industry cheers every time new money is invested in our region.

The enthusiasm has even made its way into Sweden’s own digitalisation strategy, where civil affairs minister Erik Slottner (KD) writes that “Stockholm has the second most unicorn companies in the world, only Silicon Valley has more.” This is not true — however generously you count. Not in total, and not per capita.

A more sober view of reality would be fitting. Sure, there are Swedish tech companies that are doing well. But in practice we are talking about a handful of individual companies — whose customer base, potential acquirers, or venue for a future stock market listing are all most likely in the US.

Arguments that people abroad are talking about momentum for “Silicon Valhalla” carry limited weight. Venture capitalists have everything to gain from being perceived as positive, and absolutely nothing to gain from the opposite.

The fact that there is momentum for certain AI companies in 2025 is also hardly unique. Look at the US, Israel, or the UK, for instance, for larger successes. The EU can — and seems to want to — improve here.

But we do neither ourselves nor the Nordic tech world any favours by viewing everything that happens through a rose-tinted filter. If you are looking for support for a more humble view of Sweden and Europe’s achievements in tech, you do not need to look far. Start by reading the industry’s own report, for example.

A big and embarrassing mistake by SVT

November 24, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

SVT’s Agenda using a fake AI clip in a segment is the beginning of something larger than a single act of sloppiness. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be the last — either for them or for other media outlets.

Over the weekend, the social network X gained a new feature. With the press of a button, you could find out in which country a person’s account was registered, and from where they post their updates. It became, as expected, a little strange.

Patriotic MAGA influencers turned out to be from India. Reporters said to be operating from inside Gaza were based in entirely different countries. If you previously had to wonder whether the content they shared was actually true, the question has now expanded further: these people whose posts I am sitting reading — do they even exist at all?

It is into this new media landscape that Agenda on Sunday evening chose to insert a fictional clip about American police officers. In this particular case, you would not have needed to be a great practitioner of source criticism to sense something was off. On the officer’s chest, the word “POICE” is clearly legible — without the “L,” in other words. That type of error is typical of where AI-generated images and video stand today. SVT missing this is therefore extremely careless. But we are rapidly moving into a world where obvious signals like these will no longer exist. What happens then?

Google’s new AI model, the incomprehensibly named “Nano Banana Pro,” now creates people without the glossy sheen that previously surrounded many AI images. They simply looked too perfect. They no longer do. Perfection in AI is imperfection, if you will. We are months rather than years away from video clips and images being practically indistinguishable from the real thing.

We have already seen clear consequences of this. In August last year, during the American election campaign, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris was met by a large crowd at the airport in Detroit. Enthusiastic supporters stood with signs and cheered. Nothing unusual given that it was an election year.

Donald Trump was not buying it, however. He claimed that Kamala Harris’s image had been AI-manipulated to make her appear more popular than she actually was. In this case, Trump appears to have been wrong — but his line of reasoning points to a development that will be difficult to manage. If something can be AI-generated, what is to say that everything is not? Even the things that are true?

It goes without saying that truth as a concept risks being devalued in this development. But that does not mean the search for truth needs to be.

The solution to this AI-decipherment problem will likely — ironically — be more AI. When it becomes too difficult with the naked eye to identify what is what, it may be possible for an AI tool to do exactly that. The problem is well-known to those building the products, but until now the issue has been relatively limited. The large wave of so-called deepfakes anticipated during the American presidential election largely failed to materialise. The next election campaign is unlikely to be so peaceful.

The blunder on Agenda is probably the beginning of something larger rather than an isolated act of sloppiness. Placing it in prime airtime on one of Sweden’s biggest news programmes — at the same time as the storm of criticism surrounding public service peer the BBC — is particularly unfortunate.

But it will happen again. Quite possibly at SvD too, at some point. Truth, as we know it, is under attack. And we have not yet quite worked out what our defence is supposed to be.

The CEO stands alone — now she must act

November 21, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

The most anticipated CEO departure on the Swedish stock market has begun. With Georgi Ganev leaving Kinnevik, the company is left with a large cash pile, a questionable portfolio, and a long list of question marks. Now Cristina Stenbeck must show her hand.

The warning signs began to appear as early as August 2024. Kinnevik had completed the sale of Tele2, one of the investment company’s few stable, large holdings. The result was a large bag of money — 13 billion kronor in total. CEO Georgi Ganev described the deal at the time as having been done in the spirit of Jan Stenbeck.

The foundation of the old Kinnevik was gone. Less clear was what would replace it. When 6.4 billion kronor was distributed to shareholders instead of being deployed into new companies, the obvious question arose: why does an investment company exist if it does not want to make investments?

It is easy to single out Ganev in a situation like this. As CEO for the past eight years, he bears ultimate responsibility for the business. But the reality is likely more complex than that.

One level up, Ganev has been working with a mixed board. Cross-investments were made between Kinnevik and board member Harald Mix’s own initiatives at Vargas. The distance between investing over 1 billion kronor in an attempt to produce green steel in Boden and managing Norwegian food deliveries could hardly be greater. Ganev made the investments — but the board approved them.

The board also had an obvious vacancy: the company’s owner. Not until May of this year did Cristina Stenbeck return as chair of Kinnevik’s board. Now, six months later, Ganev is leaving. That is no coincidence.

But bringing the company to this long-awaited position of clarity took too long. Kinnevik drifted when governance was not strong enough. What did the owners say during this period? Which proposed investments were voted down by the board? We do not know today. But one thing is clear: Ganev was not alone in steering Kinnevik to this position. But he has had to be the public face of it, on his own.

As he now steps down, it is therefore time for others to step forward. Cristina Stenbeck, gavel in hand, needs to show her cards. What does she want? What kind of company should Kinnevik be in 2026 and beyond?

The upcoming CEO recruitment is therefore absolutely central. The list of people who would want to sit as top executive at one of Sweden’s most legendary listed companies is long. Interest is not lacking. The challenge is therefore less about finding candidates and more about finding someone who wants the same thing as the owners — and who can both articulate the vision to the market and deliver results on the ground.

The situation for the incoming chief is in many ways ideal. The discount to net asset value sits at around 40 percent, meaning confidence in existing holdings is low. You start from the bottom — and from there, there is reasonably only one way to move. The cash pile is well-stocked following the Tele2 sale. What was not distributed to shareholders is available for new investments. A new CEO can, without nostalgia, clean up the portfolio and sharpen the focus. Becoming the new CEO of Kinnevik would be an extraordinarily difficult job — but the conditions are favourable.

But a CEO alone cannot, as noted, turn this ship around by themselves. The owners must speak out clearly about what they want and expect. The board must believe in the strategy and dare to follow through when hundreds of millions in new investments are required. That is easier said than done.

Kinnevik is now initiating what will become Sweden’s most closely watched recruitment process. Everyone knows the legacy of Jan Stenbeck. These are big shoes to fill for the next person to take over. But more important still is being clear about the direction in which those shoes are supposed to walk.

I tested it: hard to escape Nvidia

November 19, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on November 19th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

With markets tense and nervous, Nvidia — the heart of the AI economy — reports its quarterly results on Wednesday evening. But is it even possible to avoid Nvidia in your portfolio if you want to? SvD’s tech analyst Björn Jeffery decided to put it to the test.

If there is anyone who has made a name for themselves with simple, sober advice about the stock market, it is the legendary investor Warren Buffett. In his annual letter to the shareholders of his company Berkshire Hathaway in 2013, he wrote the following about how he would like a future inheritance from him to be managed:

“Put 10 percent of the money in short-term government bonds and 90 percent in a low-cost index fund tracking the S&P 500.”

The advice has not aged quite as intended. Today, around 8 percent of such a fund consists of Nvidia. More than a third is tech companies overall.

With markets now buzzing with anxiety ahead of the chip company’s report on Wednesday evening, I grew curious. How do you put together a broad stock market portfolio that does not contain Nvidia?

I decided to run an experiment and test it. It turned out to be harder than I had expected.

Let me start with the obvious: of course it is possible to trade around Nvidia. If you only buy Swedish equities, your exposure to Nvidia is essentially zero. The same if you buy property bonds or similar instruments.

But most Swedish private investors do not invest in securities that way. They want to buy funds, and preferably ones as broadly diversified as possible to avoid excessive concentration in any one sector. This is what I tried to replicate in the experiment.

So what happens if you simply buy broad global index funds? You end up with something considerably more concentrated than you might expect. In particular, global funds, US funds, and tech funds have all begun to look very similar to one another.

I looked at Länsförsäkringar Global Index, a popular Swedish global fund. The fund tracks a particular index and therefore does not pick its own stocks. This explains why the global component of this global fund has shrunk considerably.

Today it consists of more than 75 percent US equities. The single largest holding is, once again, Nvidia. Among the ten largest holdings, nine are American tech companies.

If you compare Länsförsäkringar Global Index with its sibling fund Länsförsäkringar USA Index, you find quite a few similarities, to say the least. The ten largest holdings are identical.

The pattern is similar at other global funds too.

Another popular fund, Handelsbanken Global Index, tracks a different index than Länsförsäkringar. But the contents are familiar. Eight of the ten largest holdings are tech. Nvidia is the largest at 5.9 percent of the fund. And this global fund too consists of more than 62 percent US equities. China is the second largest, at around 5.7 percent.

I went broader still. Surely there must be entirely different kinds of indices that distribute stocks more globally?

Here I found ACWI — the All World Country Index — which nonetheless suffered from something similar. The US accounts for around 65 percent of the holdings, and all of the ten largest are in tech. Topping the list again: Nvidia, with just over 5 percent.

Global funds were therefore no solution to my problem. But what about entirely different markets?

Even there I found pitfalls. Länsförsäkringar Tillväxtmarknad Index does not, admittedly, have Nvidia among its holdings. But the largest holding is TSMC — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — also known as the world’s largest chip manufacturer. TSMC is the company that produces the majority of Nvidia’s chips. Second and third among the holdings are the Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba — both very active in the AI market.

To avoid Nvidia while still maintaining broad exposure, I had to hunt considerably further down the fund list. The exchange-traded fund “Amundi MSCI USA ex Mega Cap” is an attempt at precisely this — it removes the very largest companies (“mega cap”) entirely.

But there a different problem arose: performance.

So far this year, that fund has fallen half a percent. Had I bought it at the start of the year, I would have successfully avoided Nvidia — but I would also have lost money.

The explanation for this dismal performance is the same reason Nvidia is so overrepresented in so many other funds.

In a stock index, specifically prescribed rules determine which companies are included and which are not, and also the frequency with which the index is rebalanced. When a stock performs well over a period, it gets a larger share of the index. And Nvidia has performed extraordinarily well — rising more than 1,350 percent over the past five years. Together with other tech giants like Apple and Microsoft, that success has meant they have slowly become an ever-larger part of these indices. Remove these stocks entirely and you have also missed their entire rise.

Economists tend to talk about the importance of diversification — not putting all your eggs in one basket. The tricky part is that what was a fairly diversified portfolio a few years ago has now become considerably more concentrated. If you bought a blend of global, emerging market, and US funds ten years ago, you might well be surprised how often Nvidia now shows up — directly and indirectly.

Even for someone like me — relatively informed and purposeful — attempting to build a broad fund portfolio without Nvidia was neither easy, clear-cut, nor particularly successful. Sure, it is possible. But it is unfortunately not as simple as it sounds. I am now left holding financial products with names along the lines of “iShares Inflation Linked Govt Bond UCITS ETF EUR (Acc)”. You would not find that in the average person’s portfolio.

Have you made no active choices about your savings at all? With your money in a savings account, Wednesday’s quarterly figures from Nvidia can pass you by without worry. But if you have not made any particular choices about your pension either, I have bad news.

The single largest holding in AP7 Såfa — the so-called “sofa fund”, which you are allocated when you have not chosen anything yourself — is, of course, Nvidia.

Here’s the case for AI not being a bubble

November 12, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

Tech giants are expected to burn through 4,600 billion kronor on chips and data centres next year. Many are warning of a new bubble. But what if it’s actually too little?

The numbers quickly become dizzying — difficult to read and difficult to comprehend.

26,500,000,000,000 kronor is what investment bank Citigroup estimates tech giants will spend on AI through to 2029. To put that figure in perspective: 26,500 billion kronor is roughly four times Sweden’s GDP.

It is easy to dismiss all of this as bubble economics and a prolonged replay of the dot-com era. I have made these comparisons myself in previous analyses. The intellectually honest thing to do is therefore also to pose the opposite question — what if it is actually too little?

We can start with someone close to the matter: Julian Schrittwieser, a researcher at AI company Anthropic. He believes people are poor at understanding true exponential development and what it looks like in practice. One example he gives is Covid, and how it took the outside world quite a while to truly grasp how extensive the spread of infection would become.

In the field of AI, according to Schrittwieser, we are early in what could be an exponential era. Already, the length of tasks that AI can perform is doubling every seven months. Difficult questions — and conceivable work assignments — are becoming progressively easier. In purely mathematical terms, Schrittwieser says that an AI model by the end of 2026 will be as good as a human expert in a particular field of knowledge. By the end of 2027, models will often be better than experts across the board.

That “a computer” could manage something like that would have been completely unthinkable just a few years ago. Now some believe it is within sight. The exponential moves fast.

With this as a starting point, the large investments in AI infrastructure become easier to understand. There are arguments that we are currently in a bottleneck that is constraining the pace of AI development. Had we had more electricity, more chips, and more data centres, we could have accelerated even further and reached better results sooner.

And it is precisely that underlying infrastructure that all of this is about.

What is called AGI — artificial general intelligence, the term referring to when AI becomes as smart as, or smarter than, a human — will be difficult to achieve with the capacity we have today. If you believe we are heading towards this future, we need to invest here and now. The AI companies’ advance orders for electricity from small modular reactors — SMRs — can be seen in this light. How else will there be enough electricity when we reach the point where we need it?

This does, admittedly, sound a little bubbly.

But to take a more down-to-earth comparison, one can think back to when the underground railway was being planned. This is not a historical account — those can be found elsewhere — but simply a metaphor for what it can sound like.

Imagine someone proposing to dig deep tunnels beneath Stockholm and lay rails in them. Trains would run on those rails every few minutes, and over time the network would become the most important component of how people in Sweden’s capital get from A to B. It is a large and radical idea, viewed from that moment in time.

A sceptic would likely have asked who would even want to sit in these tube-trains. They would also wonder whether it would not be enormously expensive to dig all these tunnels before we even know whether it will work, or become popular. These are reasonable objections.

But such is the nature of new infrastructure. It is uncertain, expensive — and it must precede its actual purpose by many years. If you therefore believe that a radically different society, driven by AI, is on the horizon — well, then the time to build its infrastructure is here and now.

One can hold different views on whether this AI future is as imminent as the tech giants appear to believe. One can also wonder whether such a future would be something desirable for all people on earth. But spending trillions over the coming five years “laying the rails” for such a world is at least a consistent line of reasoning from their worldview.

If you feel that humanity is in a bottleneck when it comes to solving chronic disease, climate threats, space exploration, and poverty — what exactly are we waiting for?

Is Musk worth 9,500 billion kronor?

November 6, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

A pay package of around 9,500 billion kronor. That is what Tesla’s board wants to give Elon Musk. But it is not all about the money — the board warns that Musk may leave if it does not go through. Today the question is decided.

For a couple of years, there was no hotter abbreviation on the fund market than “ESG.” The idea was to give savers the opportunity to invest in environmentally friendly and ethical funds with a clear conscience.

The abbreviation stands for “Environmental, Social and Governance,” but in all essential respects it came to be primarily about the E — environmental issues. The least exciting component — G, meaning corporate governance — received considerably less attention. And it would take Tesla’s board proposing to pay Elon Musk up to 9,500 billion kronor for anyone to start paying attention.

The question of Musk’s pay has long been a sensitive one. His previous pay package of 55 billion dollars became stuck in the American state of Delaware. Despite moving the company to the more Republican and business-friendly state of Texas, you cannot as a company and board simply do whatever you like. Today shareholders are therefore gathered to vote on the board’s proposed pay for Elon Musk in the coming years.

In simplified terms, there are two camps. The first believes that Tesla cannot manage without Elon Musk, and that the pay only kicks in if Tesla’s performance is extraordinarily strong. The promised targets are divided into twelve separate parts, and one example is that the company needs to increase its pre-tax earnings from 17 billion dollars to 400 billion dollars. If Tesla were to achieve that — an extraordinarily rare feat — who cares what the CEO gets paid? In such a scenario, every shareholder would also become enormously wealthy.

The second camp is the one that dwells more on the G in ESG. They believe the pay package is completely unreasonable regardless of what Musk achieves. The fact that the package is many times larger than the highest ever awarded sends the wrong signal about how seriously the company takes questions of corporate governance.

The third camp, if one wishes to call it that, is Elon Musk himself. On X he wrote that “Control of Tesla could influence the future of civilisation.” There is inspiration to be found here for anyone planning a salary negotiation in the near future.

The central question is whether Tesla and Elon Musk are, in all essential respects, the same thing. Board chair Robyn Denholm warns that Musk could resign from the company if the pay is not voted through, and what would that do to shareholder value? Denholm has a point if you look back at Tesla’s development up to today. The company is currently valued at four times more than Toyota — a position they would likely not have reached without Elon Musk.

At the same time, Denholm’s job is not to look after Elon Musk, but to look after Tesla and its shareholders — of whom Musk is the largest. Is the dependence on a single individual — who moreover has many other commitments alongside Tesla — healthy in the long term?

You do not need to assume bad intentions on Musk’s part to see the risks. Should he be struck by an accident, illness, or something similar, the consequences could be devastating. Losing a CEO is never good for a company, of course, but it is reasonable to assume that Tesla would lose considerably more than average if something of that kind were to happen. Building a more resilient leadership that is less dependent on one individual could be one way of managing such a risk.

The outcome of this evening’s vote is not a foregone conclusion. Tesla has run several promotional films encouraging shareholders to vote the pay through. At the same time, several owners — including the Norwegian oil fund with a one percent stake, and local parties such as Swedish Afa Försäkring — have publicly come out against the proposal. The stage is set for bad feeling whichever way it goes.

The moment could hardly be more sensitive. Tesla faces a major transition with investments in AI, robots, and self-driving cars. At the same time, Elon Musk has become politically active and has driven away many car buyers, particularly in Europe.

In the middle of all this, the board wants to offer its CEO 9,500 billion kronor. And once again, a vote — which ought to be about how to run a listed car company — will instead be about the individual Elon Musk. And with him, as is well known, anything can happen.

Lean back — AI is shortening the working week

October 28, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on October 28th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

What should we do when AI has made our jobs more efficient? Ask super-agent Ari Emanuel and the answer is: go to the theatre and watch TV. Now he is betting billions on a four-day week.

The spectacular character Ari Gold from the TV series Entourage quickly became a fan favourite. Gold, played by Jeremy Piven, was a Hollywood agent who fought for his clients and went hard at his perceived enemies. He was most famous for shouting and swearing a lot in the office.

The character is based on a real agent with the same first name — Ari Emanuel. Known for the same manner of speaking and an extraordinary career in Hollywood, Emanuel has become a highly influential player in the industry. Now he is betting billions on his latest insight: the five-day working week for employees is dead. And it is AI that makes it possible.

In the podcast The Town, Ari Emanuel is interviewed about his new plans at the company Mari — a blend of his and colleague Mark Shapiro’s first names. The thesis is that the world is moving toward a four-day working week, driven by increased productivity through AI.

Emanuel talks about data he has seen showing the trend is already under way and visible. Thursdays are becoming the new Fridays in this scenario. Long weekends are becoming longer, and the hotel and restaurant industries are examples of sectors that could benefit.

But Emanuel is primarily in the entertainment business. And here he sees a business opportunity: owning the leisure time that AI creates. He has already made his first move in this direction.

Last week Mari bought ticket company Today Tix. They primarily sell tickets to theatre performances, Broadway for example. And if you believe that interest in that kind of entertainment is going to increase, it could be a smart move to own the company that handles a large share of ticket sales.

Mari already owns other entertainment-adjacent businesses. The art fair Frieze and the tennis tournaments Madrid Open and Miami Open are some examples.

Emanuel and Shapiro have watched the development close up. Through other companies they own, for example, the fighting league UFC and the American wrestling league WWE — entertainment and sport in an enormously successful combination. In 2024, Forbes named the two brands the most valuable in the broader category of boxing and combat sports. Building strong entertainment brands to capture audience attention is something they have done better than most in Hollywood.

Another consequence of a shorter working week is that people have more time to entertain themselves from the sofa too. And here Emanuel believes — admittedly with some self-interest in the question — that a new era of high-investment content could be beginning.

Two forces are at play here. On the one hand, AI will reduce the costs of film and TV production, which will cost a great many jobs — the same effect as for the world at large, in other words. And on the other hand, interest in video content will increase as people have more free time.

Emanuel predicts that the volume of series and films will increase again and competition will intensify. The golden age of streaming that has passed could conceivably experience a renaissance. That would be excellent news for someone who earns more money the more his clients work.

Mari is one of the most concrete examples of a new type of company, adapted for a time when AI is taken for granted. Just as during the pandemic, certain types of behaviour were cemented and have persisted long afterwards. AI could plausibly follow the same path.

Even if it does not hit all industries simultaneously — or in the same way — the mere concept of a four-day working week would be something of a minor revolution for many. Mari is betting here that all employees will not merely find new tasks to fill their days with. They will need to work less.

One question decides everything for Stegra

October 21, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

As steel company Stegra faces a crisis, its current owners are confronted with a kind of ultimatum. Three billion kronor is going out the door every month — and the clock is ticking.

Being on the ownership list of a successful company is something of a minor act of genius. Think of Jane Walerud, or the American venture capital firm Sequoia — both saw the potential and invested early in Klarna, for example.

But ownership also comes with obligations. When a company faces a crisis — or simply needs further financing in general — it is the existing owners who are approached first. How they act sets the tone for how any potential new investors view the company and its future.

Now that steel company Stegra needs more money, a story is beginning to take shape from how the current ownership list looks. Who knows what, who believes in the future — and who has already given up.

The most well-known name on Stegra’s ownership list is financier Harald Mix. Via company builder Vargas, he has stood at the top as the largest owner for some considerable time. The position is natural — the person who starts a company begins with 100 percent ownership, and that is diluted as new owners and key personnel are brought in. Mix has also invested new money in previous financing rounds Stegra has carried out.

Mix also appears in several other places on the list. Through his private holding company Kallskär he is also a large individual owner, with just under 3 percent of the shares. That will likely increase as Kallskär is participating in the new financing round. Vargas — interestingly — is not.

Venture capital firm Altor, where Mix is a partner, is also a major owner of Stegra. And Kinnevik — where Mix previously sat on the board — likewise. Kinnevik has announced that it will not be contributing further money. Investment bank Pareto estimates that Kinnevik will likely need to write down around 50 percent of its current investment’s value.

That there have been nothing but delays is widely known — now talk is of a manufacturing start in early 2027 — but large industrial projects running over time is hardly unique. That should therefore not be particularly off-putting. So what has Kinnevik seen that means they do not automatically want to step up? It is not a lack of cash. At its most recent quarterly report it had 8.6 billion kronor in the bank.

When existing owners are not sufficient, new ones must be brought in. But then the conditions follow accordingly. It is those who contribute new money who dictate what happens going forward. For the existing owners who choose not to continue investing, a significant dilution will likely occur — their stake will become less valuable.

The situation is both common and legally correct. But it has some similarities to a form of coercion, albeit in a corporate context. Either you participate and contribute new money, or you lose part of the money you have already invested.

For some of Stegra’s owners, the situation is therefore something of a choice between plague and cholera. According to the Financial Times, the current money is running out, and the company’s lawyers have warned the board that Stegra risks being unable to pay its debts going forward. Putting in yet more money in such a situation is an emergency measure that resolves the immediate crisis — but probably not the underlying problem. And if you do not invest new money, you risk either being heavily diluted by new owners with tough terms — or, in the very worst case, losing everything in a future bankruptcy or reconstruction.

We are not there yet. But this is unlikely to be the last financing round Stegra will need before the business can stand on its own feet. The Financial Times reports that the company is burning around 3 billion kronor per month at present. Production is not expected to be up and running until early 2027.

Between now and then, the company will need both support and more money from those on the ownership list. How many of them will step forward when the time comes? That is the question Stegra’s management is likely wrestling with right now.

The number is alarming — the crisis could start here

October 20, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on October 20th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

The AI boom has made data centres the world economy’s new growth engine. Many are now worried that diminishing interest could lead to economic crisis.

A long, narrow grey building sits along Malmövägen, just before you drive into Staffanstorp. To the untrained eye it could be some kind of sports hall. On the inside, however, you find something entirely different. This is the home of “Microsoft Cloud Operations” — one of the tech giant’s data centres in Sweden.

The ongoing AI boom has put a laser focus on this otherwise rather sleepy category. The expansion of data centres in the United States has become so important to the American economy that some analysts believe it can barely sustain its growth without them. But what happens if demand for data centres suddenly falls?

Harvard professor Jason Furman is one of those who has asked this question and done some rough calculations. Around 4 percent of American GDP — roughly 11,000 billion kronor — is being invested in what is called intellectual property and physical computing infrastructure. A significant portion of that is data centres.

The reality is a little more nuanced than that. Had the money not been invested in data centres, it would likely have ended up somewhere else instead, which could also have contributed to GDP. Furman’s example is therefore hypothetical, but illustratively interesting.

Is the United States — and through it the entire world with its interconnected economy — relying far too much on a single category? And if so, how would the world economy fare if interest and enthusiasm were to diminish?

Such a reversal could take different forms. Today, AI companies are building out capacity for the demand they believe will emerge in the near future. The idea is that once we get there, it will be too late to build. Some individual enthusiasts argue that the lack of chips and data centres has already created a bottleneck for AI development, and that it would have progressed considerably faster had we had access to more resources.

Regardless of whether it is a bottleneck or not, data centres take a long time to build. If you believe demand of some kind will increase going forward, you have to build here and now. The long series of deals that OpenAI recently made with companies like Oracle, AMD, and Broadcom are examples of this. If it turns out that demand does not materialise — or only arrives at a different time — these billion-kronor deals could turn out to be even more expensive than they first appear.

There are also other reasons why we might not end up needing as many data centres. One simple reason is new types of AI development that do not require as much computing capacity. Last week brought one such example from Chinese tech giant Tencent. They demonstrated a new method that, in simplified terms, allows AI models to learn from themselves. The result is that the amount of computing capacity required decreases radically. The example shows how models that cost over 10,000 dollars to train are beaten by this new model — at a total cost in the region of three dollars.

Over the weekend came similar news from Alibaba, where their new system Aegaeon reduces the need for Nvidia’s H20 chips by as much as 82 percent.

Regular readers of these analyses may recall the Chinese AI model DeepSeek from January of this year. It was described at the time as a “Sputnik moment” by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen — the moment when the world realised there were other players in the AI race, China in particular. DeepSeek, like the Tencent and Alibaba examples above, also used fewer data resources than the American models. The mere thought of that caused financial markets to tremble significantly.

Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have painted themselves into a corner in several ways. To justify the companies’ high valuations, they need to sell a vision of the future with extraordinary optimism — a vision of AI becoming smarter, faster, and more accessible to more people. To meet this vision in practice, enormous investment is required here and now, including in data centre expansion. And to finance this expansion, more money is needed — preferably at a high valuation of the company.

Should any part of this loop snag — whatever the reason — it could become difficult for the AI companies to continue in the same way. The business model is built on a belief about the future commensurate with a new kind of industrial revolution. As a reminder, OpenAI’s valuation as of this writing is over 4,700 billion kronor.

For those who have invested at that level — and for the global world economy as a whole — we must hope that the money being spent on data centres is well spent. The interest — and dependence — from the outside world in this anonymous and dull industry has never been greater than it is right now.