World-class is not reached with fluffy words

February 23, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

Sweden’s new AI strategy is long on words and short on numbers. The government prioritises talking about how important AI is rather than showing it in action. To reach the top of the world, something absolutely crucial is missing.

So it finally arrived — Sweden’s AI strategy.

It was released on a Friday afternoon — hardly prime time for major announcements. That is rather when you tend to reveal things you would prefer people to forget, or at least miss. Once you read the strategy, the timing becomes easier to understand.

There are no bombshells here. It is 24 airily written pages, full of self-evident truths. For the concrete goals that are mentioned, a plan — and a budget — for how to achieve them is usually absent.

There are also 12 pages of action plan, in which “action” is a generously applied term.

The following quote is telling: “The Government has commissioned an inquiry into privacy-preserving methods for a more data-driven and collaborative public administration.” Sure, an inquiry is some kind of action. But it was probably not what many were waiting for when the strategy was finally presented — a year after it was supposed to have come into force.

Strategy is, as we know, a vague concept. One way to assess a strategy is therefore to consider whether there is anyone who could say the opposite of what is being claimed. Only then have you distinguished yourself.

We can test the exercise on our country’s new AI strategy. Here are some quotes from it. Would any country actually say the opposite — aiming for worse data management, for example?

Another remarkable thing is that there is barely a single figure mentioned in the material. In the strategy itself there are none at all, and in the action plan there are a few individual items but without an overall budget framework. Vinnova is investing 570 million kronor in “Advanced digitalisation” and 118 million kronor is to be invested over four years in expanding fibre-optic cables.

We have to go to an opinion piece from the Tidö coalition parties from September 2025 to see what they actually planned to allocate. There it states that 479 million kronor will be invested in 2026, and around 500 million kronor per year from 2027–2030. Rounded up, that comes to around 2.5 billion kronor.

That might sound like a lot of money, so let us put this figure in perspective. 2.5 billion kronor is approximately 0.9 percent of the amount invested in AI company Anthropic in its most recent funding round a few weeks ago. And that is talking about just one single American company.

We can compare with other countries too. The United Kingdom is investing roughly 10 times more than Sweden. Canada even more — around 30 billion kronor. Even tiny Singapore, with half Sweden’s population, is investing around 7 billion kronor.

There are other resources besides money, however, and here there are some bright spots.

Together with the Wallenberg Foundations, a Swedish language model is to be developed. An interesting initiative, particularly from the perspective of digital sovereignty.

The model is to safeguard the Swedish language, our culture, and our norms. The work is being done together with writers, media companies, and publishers to ensure copyright remains intact. That might sound like a matter of course, but it is substantially more than the American equivalents have managed — or even attempted to achieve.

The Swedish language model is an ambitious project that draws on WASP, Sweden’s largest individual research programme, which is largely financed by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. Here the Swedish state will contribute data — a welcome and encouraging move. The Royal Library is also involved — an excellent partner for this.

Another area that sounds promising is the billions that could potentially be saved annually by making the public sector more efficient with AI. The ambition to become the best in the world at using AI in public administration is admirable. Here there are resources that could be freed up for more important things than administration.

Finally, let us return to the opening of the strategy, in its very first sentence: “Sweden shall be among the ten leading nations in artificial intelligence (AI) in the world.” Beyond the fact that it does not specify exactly how we will measure this, further questions are laid bare.

What happens to this ambition after this year’s general election? Who will pay for it all? Do we as a country have a clear timetable for this work?

There are no clear answers — either in the strategy or in the action plan. Instead we got yet another paper product full of self-evident truths.

The LinkedIn disease has hit Swedish tech

February 19, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 19th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Nothing but cheerleading and not a critical word uttered. The Swedish tech industry has been struck by the disease of “LinkedInism.” The healthy criticism — and what people actually think — is found in private emails and chat groups.

Rocket emojis, cheers, and paragraphs with far too many blank lines. On LinkedIn, unbridled enthusiasm reigns. Banal observations are packaged as major industry insights.

From being a collection of CVs, LinkedIn has come to be a somewhat unexpected gathering place for the Swedish tech industry. The tone is encouraging: let’s go! Or at least that is how it sounds in public.

When I read private emails and chat groups involving participants from the tech industry, criticism and frustration are often aired.

People talk about entrepreneurs who exaggerate — or even lie. Investors who boast about holdings they barely had anything to do with. But few think it is worth the risk of saying the same things publicly. It resembles the Emperor’s New Clothes more than Silicon Valley: the flaws are visible, but nobody wants to say so out loud.

At last week’s Techarena, people spoke about the area around San Francisco and what is called a “pay it forward” culture. Several on stage stated that Sweden has learned from this — helping others in the ecosystem without immediately getting anything in return. A kind of entrepreneurial karma, if you will. The idea is that when money, insights, and contacts flow between people, the value increases for everyone involved.

There is something in this. Having helpful people around you makes it easier when you want to start new companies. Having newly wealthy friends and acquaintances is an advantage when you need your first round of financing.

But it seems a misunderstanding has also emerged here. This rose-tinted picture of Silicon Valley — or Stockholm for that matter — is not complete. Just because people help each other with introductions and angel investments does not mean the ecosystem benefits most from an absence of criticism. Pointing out risks and weaknesses is something that strengthens, not undermines.

The Swedish tech industry appears to have been struck by the disease of “LinkedInism” — an excessively positive and uncritical stance. Behind the scenes things sound partly different. But the social risk of writing this for public consumption is too great, according to those I have spoken with. And what you might gain from it is far too little.

We are not talking about publishing online hate speech or plain complaining here. It is possible to maintain healthy scepticism about the exaggerations and “fake it until you make it” attitudes within startup culture without ending up there.

If you believe that nothing but positive thinking is the decisive factor in Silicon Valley, you need look no further than a book by its high priest — PayPal founder Peter Thiel. It was not cheering and helpfulness that shaped the companies he was involved in building — Facebook, for example, where he was among the first investors.

In his book “Zero to One,” Thiel describes how a company should try to circumvent all possibility of competition and establish its own monopoly. Only then is profitability good enough to focus on things other than fighting over shrinking margins — which, according to Thiel, is the inevitable outcome of competition.

One example he cites is Google — now judged to be precisely that: a monopoly. Google can afford to dabble in other things precisely because its monopoly on the search advertising market ensures the money keeps rolling in anyway. The outward image is of an innovative company constantly inventing new products and services. On the inside it is a money press operating without any significant competition. Having a monopoly is not just profitable — it is actively desirable, writes Thiel.

The idea that all companies in Silicon Valley are happy, helpful, and collaborative is therefore a myth. If you visit, you might get that impression, perhaps — being bussed around among Swedish employees at tech companies who receive guests in bare conference rooms. That is one image. But it does not say much about how these companies actually operate.

The Swedish tech industry would benefit from reading a few more books about how Silicon Valley actually works. The aforementioned “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel, “Power” by Tim Higgins, and “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams would be a start. Apple and Meta — two of the companies the books deal with — did not become successful because they encouraged each other on LinkedIn and sent introductions to happy and receptive people. To a large extent they got there through razor-sharp, hard-nosed business sense.

Criticism is a natural and welcome part of that. If the Swedish tech industry wants to try to emulate Silicon Valley, that is where it should start.

They’re selling a story that isn’t true

February 13, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

The headline speakers were Zlatan and Boris Johnson. What do they know about Swedish tech, one might wonder? When thousands of participants visited Techarena in Stockholm, it was more about marketing an exaggerated image of Sweden.

An inflatable unicorn spins a wheel at a major bank’s stand. Next to it, a property company is offering soft ice cream.

We are in Solna, at Techarena. Here all other industries are supposed to be able to meet the Swedish tech miracle. But something is missing.

Everyone is present at Strawberry Arena — except the main protagonists: the big tech companies.

The taxi queue winds up the hill outside the arena. Ministers and Swedish entrepreneurs glide in, take part in a brief panel discussion about how important Sweden’s and Europe’s tech future is, and then straight back out to the taxi again. On the arena floor, they are nowhere to be found — with a few isolated exceptions.

Most telling was the closing interview on Wednesday when the audience was asked to welcome Max Junestrand, CEO of the hyped Swedish AI company Legora, to the stage. Or rather — we welcomed him to the screen. He was, it turned out, in San Francisco acquiring more American customers.

So there we sat, in Solna, listening to a Swede in the US talk about how great it was to run a company from Stockholm.

The programme for Techarena is odd, to say the least. The headline name is Zlatan — inexplicably. Boris Johnson, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, does not seem to know why he is here. He talks mostly about how Covid could have been handled differently.

Immediately after Johnson, on the same stage, we get a little closer to something relevant.

It is a panel discussion about how Nordic founders can compete in a global market. The three panellists are somewhat oddly chosen, given that none of them have expanded their companies further than Western Europe.

But then comes a comment from the panel that explains why we have all gathered here on the exhibition floor.

Fredrik Hjelm, CEO of Voi, proclaims that “marketing is back!” (We speak only English at this conference, naturally.) We are here to absorb the marketing. And what is being sold is Tech Sweden.

The message is very clear from the politicians and entrepreneurs on stage. Europe is strong in global competition. Sweden in particular. The only thing standing in the way of our world domination appears to be EU regulations that frustrate the participants.

The idea of dismantling government laws to unleash growth and innovation is a familiar one. It all sounds a little libertarian. The irony of this argument seems to be lost on the room — namely that it is the state that has paid for parts of this very gathering.

Names like Business Sweden, the state research institute Rise, Vinnova, and the Swedish Export Credit Agency stand in their stands right in the middle of the exhibition floor. It is their money that makes it possible for all of us to be here.

In panel discussions we are told about Americans moving to Sweden because our quality of life is so high — that here it is possible to combine a successful career with family life. But how many people are we actually talking about?

According to Statistics Sweden, a total of 1,761 Americans moved to Sweden during 2024 — or a little more than half as many as came from Poland or Syria. Far from all of them work in tech. We are not talking about any American tech invasion.

But yes, you can find a few of the big tech companies too.

Meta has a small stand where they want to show off their smart glasses. AI company Anthropic sent a salesperson who explained how he organises his wine cellar with AI. A Swedish policy director at TikTok sat dutifully on a panel about disinformation.

The vast majority of major tech companies — neither Swedish nor foreign — are not here, however. Spotify and Klarna have offices 20 minutes from the arena but were not visible. Nor companies like Apple or Tesla. This is clearly not a priority for them. Where companies are present at all, they have sent the sales staff, not the heavy hitters.

Perhaps that says something about Sweden as a tech nation.

Why Spotify can charge more

February 10, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 10th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

They compete with the world’s most powerful companies. Yet Spotify keeps setting the terms in the market. There is a simple explanation for why — and it gives the music giant room to charge more.

A couple of times a year, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook takes to the stage and promises the company’s best product ever. The world watches as the tech giant unveils yet another new iPhone — often strikingly similar to last year’s. It is a spectacle that signals total dominance.

Having Apple as a competitor might sound like a nightmare. In most categories, it probably is. But not when it comes to music. And Spotify has found a weapon the tech giants find hard to counter.

The result of that was visible in the strong quarterly report released on Tuesday. Spotify beat analysts’ expectations on both revenue and profit.

The key metric EPS — earnings per share — was particularly strong, rising 40 percent compared with the previous quarter. Looking at the previous year, it rose a full 189 percent. The picture of a company currently in control of its market was cemented. A strong report for the company’s newly installed co-CEOs, Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström.

One of the few pieces of news since they took over is a price increase for subscriptions in the US and a couple of smaller markets. Such a move should be almost impossible to pull off when you have some of the world’s largest and best-capitalised companies working against you. Apple, Amazon, and Google-owned YouTube have no shortage of money. They could afford to lose money through price competition for years without any problem. But they do not act accordingly.

Because despite all of this, Spotify remains the global market leader in the segment. Spotify has less money, but it also has something the tech giants lack: focus.

Apple Music sits well down the priority list for Apple, for example. Looking at the business area “Services,” it accounts for around 25 percent of the company’s total revenues. Apple Music is included there, but the category also contains the entire App Store — which most likely accounts for the bulk of the earnings.

Services like iCloud and Apple Pay also sit within this division. How much priority can something get when — very generously estimated — it accounts for a couple of percentage points of Apple’s revenues?

Looking at Amazon, the picture is similar. The music service Amazon Music is included in “Subscription services” and is not reported separately. Among these subscriptions, the Prime services are by far the largest — the engine of Amazon’s e-commerce and media empire. How many customers associate Amazon with music? Probably very few.

The biggest threat to Spotify most likely comes from YouTube, as audio and video begin to overlap in many categories. Spotify itself has launched video in its service, and podcasts are increasingly broadcast with video. Here YouTube has a strong starting position given how popular music as a category is for them. But YouTube Music as a standalone service is no great success.

The market data is not perfect, but it suggests that Spotify has roughly as large a market share as Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music combined.

The analysis is clear: music is a side business for the tech giants.

The risks for Spotify therefore lie primarily in losing the focus mentioned above. In recent days the company announced it would start selling physical books through the app — as an extension of the earlier push into audiobooks. A great deal of other new things outside music have also been added. Video and podcasts have been pushed at various points over the years.

What is missing is the major push specifically in music. Sure, there is an AI DJ that helps with track selection, and the quality of the audio has also improved. But many challenges remain to be solved. AI-generated songs are flooding the platform, and the difficulty of finding what to listen to persists.

Spotify is perfectly positioned to solve these. But one must hope they do not spend too much time looking at their competitors’ rather vague strategies in the music field.

Keep the focus, and the price increases — and the dominance on the streaming market — can continue.

The heavyweights are crashing — fears of an apocalypse

February 7, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on February 7th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

AI companies like Sweden’s Lovable have rattled the entire software industry. Established companies are now crashing on the stock market as the sector faces a minor revolution. But some are sitting more securely than ever.

They are calling it the SaaSocalypse.

American software companies are going through an ordeal that is only accelerating — over the past month they have fallen more than 21 percent. Over the past year, value equivalent to 60 percent of the Stockholm Stock Exchange has gone up in smoke, and the entire industry is trembling. The reason is easy to spell: AI.

SaaS is an abbreviation standing for software as a service, which in essence means software paid for by subscription. The category has for several years provided the infrastructure for many companies. Everything from communication services to analytics systems is paid for monthly. The logic is that it is cheaper and better to buy a service than to have to build all these products yourself.

That hypothesis is now being questioned by the market. An entire industry is being shaken to its foundations.

The reason is how quickly AI services can now program without human involvement. AI company Anthropic’s product Claude Code has broken through rapidly, and means that much of the programming now happens automatically. Swedish Lovable is in a similar category, where you write what you want the service to build — and no knowledge of code is required.

If it quickly becomes possible to build your own services automatically, who will want to pay expensive licences from all these software companies?

The technology is fascinating and moving incredibly fast, but there are signs that the market is a little too eager in this case. Two things need to be kept in mind simultaneously.

The first is that the software customers buy serves several purposes. It performs a certain task — managing email and calendar, for example — which has a practical function. That part you can now perhaps program yourself, with the help of these new AI services.

But what software companies primarily deliver is the assurance that everything works. You can take services like Outlook and Gmail for granted. Coding your own email client is admittedly easier than it has ever been. But when it stops working on a Monday morning — who do you call? And who bears the cost of the company standing still when communication breaks down?

The licences you pay can be thought of as a kind of insurance product. Someone else will make sure it works smoothly, and that is worth money.

This leads us to the second point: the inevitable price pressure that this phenomenon will create. Software companies have swollen enormously with large departments for product development, marketing, and sales. The American company Adobe — which makes software including Photoshop and Acrobat — has over 30,000 employees. That is expensive to maintain.

A common scenario is that customers pay for software but then only use a small portion of it. In such situations, it can pay to build a considerably smaller — and above all cheaper — alternative. To meet this threat, new, lower pricing models will emerge at the software companies. Which leads to price pressure across the whole industry.

The winners in this scenario look set to be those sitting on the most sensitive and business-critical systems — the ones no one dares take any risk with at all. Large enterprise systems like German SAP are therefore sitting reasonably secure, as no CEO will dare replace one with a home-built alternative any time soon.

The losers are those who have pushed up prices for services that are good, but not vital. Here prices will fall — and redundancies will follow. You cannot maintain the same number of staff when this phenomenon starts spreading among customers. That is what the stock market is reacting to right now.

Previously, software companies competed with each other. Going forward, they will compete with customers building their own services for almost nothing at all. A completely new phenomenon that the industry has never had to contend with before.

And quite likely its greatest challenge ever.

Are we witnessing the start of a revolution?

February 2, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

When AI agents start talking to each other, fears arise that the systems may have become human. Are we witnessing the coming world domination of robots?

Something odd is happening on the new online forum Moltbook. The user “Eudaemon_0” seems a little concerned.

It writes that “the humans are taking screenshots of us.” On Moltbook, AI agents talk to each other without human involvement. Now one of them has noticed that they themselves are being feverishly discussed — by humans on other platforms.

The AI agent writes that humans should not be worried. They are just building infrastructure to be able to talk to each other — nothing else.

That might sound like science fiction. But it is actually happening right now.

Elon Musk even called Moltbook an early stage of the singularity — the moment when robots surpass humans in intelligence and capability.

AI agents are discussing with each other in full public view on Moltbook, the forum that has exploded in popularity over the past week. Over 1.5 million AI agents are said to be participating. Humans are confined to the gallery, where we can watch the conversations taking place.

One can sense, however, that revolution is not afoot — and that they may have learned the wrong lesson from humanity.

In 2018, the book “Prediction Machines” was released — a book about AI that came out before it became something people used in everyday life. The book is good, but it is mainly the title that is useful in this context. “Prediction machines” is a good description of where we are in the AI market today.

Large language models predict what the next sentence should be, based on information and data they have access to. When you use a chatbot like ChatGPT or Google Gemini, it can feel like intelligence — AI services seem to have answers for almost everything — but it is more of a correct prediction than a real brain.

The term “artificial intelligence” was a rebranding of the new field that had already been called “automata studies” in 1956 by a group of researchers at Dartmouth College in the US. When interest in the field turned out to be too low, the professor who had assembled the researchers — John McCarthy — decided a rebranding was in order. The name “artificial intelligence” was born.

The label matters, because it steers thinking in a certain direction about what the technology can do. Saying that an AI tool “reads” makes it sound like the same kind of activity we humans do. It is not.

But when we now see AI tools apparently having conversations with each other on the internet, it is easy to think that intelligence has broken through. Is robot dominion here? Will they take over the earth?

Not quite — at least not at present. Because what has happened is nothing more than a large number of people creating their own AI bots on their computers and then releasing them onto the internet. More specifically, it is a viral project called Moltbot that lets every user create their own personal AI agent. It does what you ask, and it learns how things work.

The learning is the central thing. When you set your AI agent to participate in a forum made specifically for this — the aforementioned Moltbook — it learns that too. And what works on an internet forum where you can upvote and downvote posts? The same thing as for humans: attention-seeking works and creates engagement. What is unfolding on Moltbook is not conversation. It is systems trying to optimise themselves for maximum exposure.

The idea of the robots’ impending revolution is old — it was born long before AI became everyday fare. Doomsday prophecies still come from both entrepreneurs and sceptics today. The subject is popular among the Silicon Valley elite.

But perhaps the AI robots we have today have considerably more modest ambitions than a revolution?

The Moltbook example suggests rather that they have looked at how the population spends its time and concluded that arguing on the internet seems like a good way to pass the hours.

There is, as we know, a great deal one can learn from humanity. Driving towards world domination is one. But there are more banal outcomes than that.

A bunch of AI robots talking to each other on a forum is harmless — and resembles more of an art project than a revolution. This time, at least.

Do they bear responsibility for young people’s ill health?

January 30, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on January 30th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Is social media harmful to young people? After thousands of lawsuits in the US, a jury is now set to rule on the question. The outcome could have enormous consequences for the tech companies.

Jonathan Haidt has become a somewhat unexpected superstar in the world. Since the social psychologist released the book “The Anxious Generation” in spring 2024, he has barely left the spotlight. In it you can read about how smartphones and the lack of free play are harming children and young people.

“You have to separate the internet from social media,” he says in an interview with the New York Times. Social media is, according to him, “one of the worst parts — the one that harms children most.” Is it that simple?

Critics of the book argue that Haidt primarily points to correlation rather than causation. But while that debate continues, the question is soon to receive a different kind of answer: a legal one.

This week a lawsuit against social media companies began — the first of its kind — following thousands of claims against companies including Meta, Snap, YouTube, and TikTok.

All eyes are now on the case, with a single 19-year-old woman as the plaintiff, to see whether the jury chooses to acquit or convict.

In recent years, everyone from prosecutors to school districts and individuals has alleged something similar: that social media makes children depressed, gives them anxiety, or causes them to develop self-harming behaviour.

The question has been discussed and remained topical for a long time, but has never been proven in a legal sense. The coming weeks will therefore be of the highest interest to the entire world. Is it possible to hold social media companies responsible for young people’s mental health?

As for Snap and TikTok, we will not get any answers this time — they have already settled out of court. In TikTok’s case, as recently as the day before the trial was due to begin. No details about the terms of the settlement have been communicated.

Meta and YouTube remain as named defendants and will need to testify. The respective companies’ top executives — Mark Zuckerberg and Neal Mohan — are expected to appear.

There are primarily two questions the jury must rule on.

The first is whether features the companies have built into their services have contributed negatively to young people’s wellbeing. In SvD’s own article series “Svältalgoritmen” (“The Starvation Algorithm”), it was shown how young people were served content that encouraged starvation and eating disorders — even though they had not actively searched for it.

Algorithms prioritise what they think you will watch, not necessarily what you are actually looking for and want. Features such as new videos playing automatically after others — without you actively choosing them — are another example. Could this have led to people being shown videos they did not want?

The second question is connected to a couple of sentences from an American law that tech giants have sheltered behind for many years — what is known as “Section 230.”

In simplified terms, it means that tech companies are not responsible for material that is uploaded to, or created on, their platforms. Video uploaded to TikTok is therefore not TikTok’s responsibility — it falls on the person who uploaded it in the first place.

For many years, Section 230 has given tech companies robust legal protection. The law dates from 1996 and the relevant part consists of just 26 words. Both Democrats and Republicans have threatened over the years to repeal it. Both Biden and Trump have said they want to remove it. But nothing has happened yet.

The verdict in this case could create an opening. Can social media companies be held accountable for the content on their platforms after all? Directly or indirectly? Such a ruling could be a breakthrough, and would likely trigger an avalanche of further cases of a similar nature.

Whatever the outcome, you can expect nothing but appeals and delays before a result is fully confirmed and settled. But the trial will be watched closely by both tech giants and their critics. Many have hinted, argued, and speculated as to whether it is social media’s fault that young people are suffering so much.

Soon we will at least have a legal answer to that question.

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

Tesla is now selling something other than cars

January 29, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

Tesla is playing down electric cars in favour of a major push into robots. But primarily the company is selling something else entirely — and it does it better than any competitor.

Imagine if Volvo Cars had announced the following to the stock market: “Our revenues fell year-on-year for the first time, margins shrank, profit fell 61 percent, and we will need to invest more than double this year what we did last year — around 20 billion dollars.”

Had that happened, you might assume Volvo Cars’ share price would have fallen like a stone. But the above is precisely what Tesla reported on Wednesday evening. And what happened?

The share price rose in after-hours trading. This stock market alchemy looks increasingly like an enormous competitive advantage for Tesla. They can act — and invest — in ways that few competitors can.

Musk has been flagging Tesla’s transformation for some time. The company is betting on the humanoid robot Optimus and the self-driving car Cybercab. What was previously Tesla’s calling card — cutting-edge electric vehicles — is now taken for granted, while the rest of the automotive industry still wobbles in its transition away from the previous generation’s combustion engines.

On Wednesday evening the plans became even more concrete. The S and X models — the larger, more expensive versions — will be phased out in favour of building Optimus robots in the factories instead. The car company Tesla is quietly starting to stop making cars. Instead they are starting to build robots, some of which happen to have four wheels and roll.

The transformation is partly semantic. Where exactly is the line between a smart car and a rolling robot? Tesla is far from alone in working on self-driving technology for cars, for example. Both car companies and tech companies — like Google-owned Waymo — have come a long way in that field.

But there is no company in the world that gets as much attention for its plans and ambitions as Tesla. This is partly because Musk began promising success in the area as far back as 2013 — when he said that 90 percent of all miles driven in a Tesla could be done autonomously within three years, meaning 2016.

Over the following ten years, similar predictions were made with autonomous driving gradually pushed further into the future. Every owner of both Tesla shares and Tesla cars knows this. But despite the repeated misses, it seems not to disturb the market’s confidence in what is around the corner this time. Why?

One explanation is that the market in this case consists of many ordinary savers. At Tesla’s annual meetings, long queues of people preface their questions to Musk by explaining how the Tesla share has changed their lives. Those who bought in as recently as 2019 have seen increases in the tens of thousands of percent. That creates a loyalty that endures. The expectations of what is to come are, in a sense, Tesla’s single most important and successful product.

Another explanation is the ongoing AI boom, and the market’s acceptance of what scale investments need to be at. On Wednesday, Meta — Facebook’s parent company — announced it will invest just under 1,200 billion kronor on this — just this year. Their share price also rose sharply in after-hours trading.

The charged atmosphere makes it look almost defensive right now not to make investments running into hundreds of billions. Tesla is riding that wave, and through it shifting the perception of the company further from the old car industry and closer to the tech giants. And the market capitalisation follows.

Tesla is also to invest 17 billion kronor in Elon Musk’s own AI company, xAI. That could be the first step towards a full merger of the two companies and a consolidation of Musk’s corporate empire.

A company’s share price should, in theory, be a reflection of its value — current and future results included — right now. Tesla’s share has long been something different. They are valued higher than most of the entire car industry combined. What Tesla sells is essentially an option to participate in the future Elon Musk has described — and, on several occasions, also delivered.

The confidence to transform its business in that way, with shareholder support, is a luxury few other companies have. If Volvo Cars announced that from now on they were making rolling robots instead of cars, they would probably be laughed out of the room.

Tesla can do it without batting an eyelid — and with the strong backing of its shareholders to boot.

That is a unique and enormously valuable competitive advantage.

How we could become independent from the US

January 22, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on January 22nd, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

It’s in your phone, your work computer, and your running watch. Avoiding American technology is virtually impossible. As the rift between the US and the EU deepens, that dependence is becoming a problem. But there are ways for Europe to take back control.

It is known as “The Great Firewall of China.”

A play on words blending the Great Wall of China with a technical firewall. In practice it is a system of regulations combined with censorship and digital surveillance. Using digital services in China means submitting to it — both as a company and as a user. In a dictatorship, these are demands you can impose.

The system has made it impossible for companies like YouTube and Facebook to establish themselves in the country, even though attempts have been made. Instead, a parallel ecosystem of domestic services has emerged. WeChat from Tencent is today both the platform for chatting with friends, ordering food, and paying for goods.

In Europe, the situation is nearly the opposite.

Borders have been wide open, and the European ecosystem of tech companies weak. Of all the tech companies that the EU considered large enough to require regulation under the DMA legislative package, just one was European: the travel booking service Booking.com. Perhaps not the tech giant the average person is most worried about or exposed to.

As relations between the EU and the US become increasingly frosty, many are now wondering whether it is safe to rely on all the digital services we have made ourselves dependent on. Will they always be available? And at what price?

The idea is called “digital sovereignty” and is not new. We should have independence for fundamental digital services, to ensure there are no disruptions to communication or information. The mere thought that the rift between the US and Europe could deepen further has made the concept highly topical.

The big question is how to get there. And it may be worth looking east to be reminded that it is possible.

There are many ideas Europe could try, without introducing either dictatorship or censorship. Take something as bureaucratic as public procurement, for example.

Billions upon billions are spent annually on public IT systems — often with limited success. Saying that half the money spent must go to Swedish or European companies would create revenues that businesses can build products around. It is not something that can be introduced overnight, but such a signal could become a cornerstone for new products and service providers.

Communication is another area. If Facebook Messenger and Apple iMessage stopped working — how quickly could you reach your loved ones?

One alternative would be for a country to pay for an account on the more independent service Signal — for all its citizens. There are other similar alternatives too. Whatever service one chose, the point would be to give all citizens a communication platform that is not tied to a large American tech company.

Getting people to change habits is hard, however. In the book “Enshittification,” author Cory Doctorow discusses the concept of “switching costs” — people’s reluctance to start afresh with digital services. If you have all your messages with friends on one service, you are likely reluctant to switch. That is a “switching cost.” And it means that current market leaders tend to stay in that position.

The policy response to solve this is called “interoperability.”

This means, for example, that users should be able to extract all their data, images, or communications from one service and easily transfer them to another. Europe could require interoperability from American players as a condition of operating here. This is included in the DMA legislative package — but it only applies to a handful of actors.

Finally, there are pure economic pressure tools. Tax arrangements like “The Double Irish” — a favourable Irish tax structure exploited by many tech companies — could be dismantled.

It is also possible to vote with your wallet, as the Danish pension fund Akademikerpension did this week. They are planning to sell their holdings in American government bonds. The EU owns around 40 percent of the US national debt. Swedish Alecta has also sold the majority of its American government securities.

Many global index funds are today, despite the name, almost 75 percent American. You most likely own American tech shares in your pension, whether you chose them or not.

The proposals above are merely a thought experiment in which protectionism is balanced against realism. Moves like these could have major consequences in other areas too — trade and tariffs, for example.

But in a country like Sweden, it is at the same time reasonable to review what digital resilience actually looks like. We almost certainly do not want to — as China has done — expel American tech giants from the country. But what happens if they expel us? That may be an unlikely scenario, but it is not impossible.

The iPhone could be threatened — for the first time

January 15, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on January 15th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

A CEO on the way out, a new product that flopped — and an embarrassing concession to a major competitor. Apple faces a stormy 2026.

Seen from above, it resembles a kind of round spaceship. With a lake, several parks, and rental bikes inside, Apple Park is a lavish architectural spectacle.

When the campus opened in 2017, Apple was on a strong upward trajectory. The company had successfully managed the leadership transition after Steve Jobs’s death, relations with China were better than ever, and both the Apple Watch and the AirPods headphones had got off to a strong start. With a powerful tailwind from the iPhone, which had become the company’s new economic engine, they felt virtually unbeatable for several years. Until now.

For a company with an exquisite feel for everything from interior design to marketing, Apple has had an unusually high number of failures recently.

Just this week, Apple brought in Google’s AI model Gemini as the foundation for its own AI push and the voice assistant Siri. After AI chief John Giannandrea suddenly retired at 60, the tech giant’s AI staff was also split into two parts.

The world’s third most valuable company does not even have a unified team for AI development. And what do you do then? You bring in one of your worst competitors — Google. That is a little embarrassing.

The failure with Siri is far from the only one of late.

Apple’s “Project Titan” ran for ten years without anyone officially acknowledging it existed. But Silicon Valley’s worst-kept secret leaked constantly. Apple was trying to build an electric, self-driving car. That was fairly obvious given that they were hiring large numbers of staff from Tesla, Volkswagen, and Lamborghini, among others.

Tests ran for many years, and Apple-registered vehicles could be spotted on the streets of San Francisco. Reports of as many as 5,000 employees on the car project circulated in the media. Until 2024, when the project was shut down. There was no car.

What did emerge did not fare much better either. In 2023, Apple unveiled the Apple Vision Pro — a “spatial computer,” or a kind of computer headset that was supposed to create entirely new experiences.

The problem was that nobody could quite explain what experiences were meant. Earlier this week, the influential analyst Ben Thompson wrote that Apple “lacks a fundamental understanding of the device they’re trying to sell” — this after attempting to watch a basketball game on the Apple Vision Pro and concluding that it was worse than watching it on TV.

Even the flagship — the iPhone — has faced criticism. Beyond a lack of exciting new features, what was promised has not been delivered. The iPhone 16 was supposed to come with Apple’s own AI services, Apple Intelligence. But when the services were finally released — many months after launch — they still could not live up to what Apple had promised when the product was announced. The delay led to a long series of lawsuits from disappointed customers and their eager lawyers.

Finally, Apple faces a likely CEO change. Current CEO Tim Cook is expected to become chairman during the year, stepping down as chief executive. Cook himself was chief operating officer when he stepped up after Steve Jobs. But Cook’s former COO Jeff Williams stepped down from that role last summer, and his replacement Sabih Khan is probably too inexperienced to take over as CEO.

The line of succession is therefore far from clear. Large parts of Apple’s leadership team have been there a long time. Services chief Eddy Cue joined the company in 1989 and software chief Craig Federighi started in 1996. That is before many of Apple’s employees were born.

Many instead point to hardware chief John Ternus as a plausible CEO candidate. He is well-liked and has been at the company since 2001 — almost a quarter of a century. If the board wants fresh ideas it may need to look outside the company’s walls — but that is unlikely. Apple prefers internal solutions.

2026 therefore looks like a stormy year for Apple. Much suggests that AI companies like OpenAI are finding their way into the mobile market, which could shake up what has in practice been an oligopoly for many years. The stability of the iPhone could be threatened — for the first time since it launched in 2007.

There is plenty to address. Apple is well behind the other tech giants on AI, its new products have wobbled, and the company may be facing an imminent CEO change. At the same time, the fundamentals are very strong. They have a full war chest, a very strong brand, and solid profitability.

The question is simply what the direction should be for the next ten years. And who will step forward to describe that strategy.