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.

The giant crash exposes crypto’s vulnerability

October 14, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are they facing their ‘iPhone moment’?

October 9, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is all of this just a performance?

October 5, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ek silenced the doubters — and was right in the end

September 30, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Ek is already written into the history books.

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

September 23, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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