OnlyFans is more than just a porn site

May 24, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apple can’t find its next iPhone

May 22, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The billion-dollar deal could mean two things

May 21, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for Stenbeck to demand accountability

May 14, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The total portfolio consists of 33 relatively anonymous companies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The utopia could give way to plain capitalism

May 6, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’re the ones who pay when Amazon backs down

May 2, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 2nd, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Amazon beat market expectations, but the only word anyone wanted to talk about was “tariffs.” E-commerce has become high politics — and millions of small businesses are now being squeezed between Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump.

Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos may have thought he would be able to live a somewhat quieter life after stepping down as CEO of his mega-company. The multi-billionaire found himself a new fiancée and recently launched her and a number of other celebrities into space on a rocket from his own space company, Blue Origin.

You know — the sort of things billionaires entertain themselves with.

Things have not been particularly quiet, however. Trump’s trade tariffs have placed the otherwise neutral and politically innocuous world of e-commerce squarely in the spotlight. When it was reported that Amazon was planning to display for customers exactly how much of a product’s price consisted of tariffs, a minor political crisis erupted. And Donald Trump did not call Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy — he called Bezos directly. Shortly afterwards came a very brief message — just 31 words — from Amazon explaining that the company had never approved this change.

When Amazon gathered its analyst community late on Thursday evening, Swedish time, the intention was to keep the focus on the first quarter of the year. Trump’s “Liberation Day,” when the tariffs were introduced, was 2 April — two days after that quarter ended. But in a turbulent global environment, the sales figures from earlier in the year felt distant. The company was expected to report its lowest revenue growth since 2022 — and that was even before the tariffs had been introduced.

Under normal circumstances, Amazon would have delivered a solid quarterly report. Both revenue and profit came in above analyst expectations. CEO Andy Jassy said he was “optimistic” that the company could emerge from the tariff crisis stronger than before it. But what else would he say? CFO Brian Olsavsky did, however, acknowledge that the situation was creating uncertainty.

And that was what the market saw too. The share fell around 3 percent in after-hours trading, and is down a total of around 13 percent since the start of the year.

The tariffs pose a unique challenge for Amazon. For even if the company were to try to shift towards more American suppliers, a large portion of the goods on its platform are not ones it controls itself. Around a quarter of Amazon’s revenues — and over 60 percent of the number of items — come from other traders who use Amazon’s platform purely as a sales channel. To the customer it looks essentially identical — they shop on the website and receive packages. But it is a separate company doing the selling, and it pays fees to Amazon for the privilege.

These businesses range from private individuals to multimillion-dollar companies built up using Amazon’s infrastructure. In total there are around two million different businesses actively selling on the platform, of which roughly 1.1 million are based in the United States alone. Collectively they are large, but they do not act as a unified group and therefore lack negotiating power. Finding new suppliers to circumvent tariffs is therefore an extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming task given the scale of the problem — especially since many of these sellers do not do this full-time, but run their Amazon operation as a side business.

The prospect of millions of sellers all replacing Chinese and other Asian suppliers with American alternatives is therefore a near-impossible task — at least in the near term. Especially since up to 70 percent of all goods on Amazon come from China. The risk is therefore more that sellers choose to close their businesses entirely. That would hurt Amazon’s revenues significantly — but it would above all affect individual American entrepreneurs whose livelihoods could be destroyed.

The so-called “adjustment” brought about by the tariffs — as the American government has described it — is something Amazon will be able to manage. It is one of the world’s largest companies with a broad portfolio of revenue streams, much of which has nothing to do with e-commerce at all. It is, for example, one of the world’s largest providers of cloud services. But the individual sellers on its platform are not necessarily as resilient. If the tariffs cause them to scale back — or shut down — it could be a severe blow both to Amazon and to American commerce as a whole.

Google’s dominance could soon be over

April 25, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on April 25th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Google beat expectations for the start of the year, but the big risks lie further ahead. Having lost three court cases in succession, many are now wondering whether we are approaching the end of Google as we know it.

As an investor, it is easy to love Google. The advertising on its search engine has been the perfect product — predictable, growing, and extremely profitable. If you use the internet, it is almost impossible to avoid the ads.

But for the first time in a long while, there are serious storm clouds gathering. In less than three years, ChatGPT has accumulated 160 million daily users — four times more than Google’s equivalent product, Gemini. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is shaping up to be a genuine challenger to the dominant search engine. And a threat to the advertising revenue — for the first time in over twenty years.

On top of that, the court cases have started piling up. After three consecutive defeats, Google has been found to be running illegal monopolies in various segments of its business. The otherwise rock-solid foundation of the world’s fifth-largest company has begun to show cracks.

It was therefore something of an uphill situation when Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, came to present the quarterly results. Not because the numbers were bad — on the contrary, they beat expectations — but because many had their attention fixed on the future rather than on the quarter just passed.

Pichai presented a healthy company that exceeded analyst estimates on both revenue and profit. And it was precisely the search advertising that drove the strong results. The company is under pressure — but for now, users are still searching and clicking freely. The share price jumped in after-hours trading but has lost considerable ground since the start of the year.

The aforementioned court cases hovered in the background throughout the presentation. The most recent ruling came just before Easter. Google has said it will appeal, meaning it will likely take several years before everything is fully resolved. But as an indication of what the future may hold, it is concerning.

The cases covered, for example, the search engine itself and the agreement with Apple that made Google the default on all iPhones. The most recent ruling concerned advertising technology — the very core of Google’s revenues. If this is being established as unlawful in its home market, what might similar processes look like in an increasingly tech-sceptical EU?

Google’s monopoly-like position has, until now, been seen as a positive by investors — an almost impregnable fortress where giants like Microsoft, for all its billions spent on its Bing search engine, could not even make a dent. The problem lies in what the consequences of the rulings could eventually be. For even if it is unusual to go to such lengths, there is a good deal to suggest that Google could end up being broken up.

Looking back a considerable distance in time, to 1911, the American Supreme Court determined that Standard Oil had become too powerful and was distorting competition in the oil market. A total of 34 new companies were created from Standard Oil, two of which eventually became the now well-known Chevron and ExxonMobil. The purpose of breaking up the company was to increase competition in the market.

That sounds almost self-evident. But on the internet, monolithic companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have been allowed to operate largely unimpeded since the early 2000s. Microsoft faced a similar process over its web browser Internet Explorer, but managed to reach a settlement in 2001 that kept the company intact. The concessions Microsoft made, however, benefited Google directly. Its browser Chrome was given a fair chance — and broke through in a very big way.

Now the situation is reversed. In court, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, testifies that it would happily buy Chrome from Google if that were possible. The search engine DuckDuckGo testified that the value of Google’s browser could be as much as 50 billion dollars. Consider what would happen if every search made through Chrome today led to ChatGPT instead of Google. The global search market would change overnight.

For the rest of the world, tariffs and trade barriers are the dominant concern right now. And that will affect Google too — not least as companies like Shein and Temu scale back their advertising spending. But for Sundar Pichai, the tariffs turned out to be a relatively minor matter to contend with. For now, the advertising revenue keeps rolling in — predictably and profitably, as it always has. But if Google is forced to sell parts of its business, investors’ favourite could soon become a very different type of company. Whether it wants that or not.

Mark Zuckerberg’s future is on the line

April 14, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

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

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is being taken to court as his company’s future hangs in the balance. If he loses, the company could face a forced sale worth billions.

On Monday, the trial begins that could change social media forever.

The American competition authority FTC is accusing Meta — Facebook’s parent company — of running a monopoly. The case centres in particular on the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, and what the real motives behind them were. If the FTC prevails, Meta could be forced to break itself up — and initiate a forced sale of certain parts of the business. The social media market would then change enormously.

Meta contends that it has competed hard but fairly through its acquisitions, and points to the fact that the market has changed significantly since the purchases took place. Instagram was acquired in 2012, when it was a small but promising photo app. WhatsApp was acquired in 2014. Since then, TikTok has become a strong competitor, as have YouTube and Snap.

The trial is the result of an investigation that has been under way for almost six years. Right up until the last moment Meta tried to avoid the courtroom — including through direct lobbying of President Donald Trump. Those efforts were unsuccessful, and now Zuckerberg and a number of other executives are being called to testify in a process expected to last between six and eight weeks.

The central question the FTC is pursuing is hypothetical: would Meta be as dominant today if it had not bought Instagram and WhatsApp? The FTC argues the answer is no, but the challenge for them lies in proving it. To do so they are drawing, among other things, on internal emails that emerged during the investigation. In 2008, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that “it is better to buy than to compete.” In 2013, a senior technology executive at the company wrote that “personally I think companies like WhatsApp are the biggest threat to Facebook.”

The approach has been called “buy or bury.” In short, it meant that Facebook allowed competitors to use parts of its platform to gain more users or features. But if a competitor became too successful — to the point of posing a potential threat to Facebook — access to the platform was cut off. The choice for competitors therefore felt like being acquired by Facebook (“buy”) or losing momentum and potentially being shut out (“bury”).

The trial comes at a turning point in American politics where the overlap with technology has never been greater. Elon Musk is cleaning up public finances while simultaneously selling electric cars and launching rockets, and the list of tech CEOs who appeared on stage at Trump’s inauguration was long. For its part, Meta has recently changed its content moderation approach to something more suited to Trump, and has just appointed Dina Powell McCormick — a former Trump adviser — to its board.

Given all this, one might imagine that the government agency FTC would be more sympathetic towards tech giant Meta’s strategy and methods. But the investigation began during Trump’s first presidential term, when he had a considerably more sceptical attitude towards “Big Tech” and Meta in particular. More than anything else, however, the new FTC chief, Andrew Ferguson, has a different view of how fair competition in business should be achieved.

In an interview with Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, Ferguson described his position as follows:

“If we really vigorously enforce the competition laws, we avoid the need for regulation.”

Fewer laws regulating what companies can do, in other words. But that presupposes the playing field was fair to begin with. And that is precisely what the FTC is alleging it was not. The point is that genuine competition cannot emerge when the market has already started on an unequal footing.

Meta now faces several weeks of questioning. Former senior executives including Sheryl Sandberg are being called in to account for how decisions were made during her time at the company. Meta has a strong position given that it will be difficult for the FTC to prove hypothetical scenarios.

Meta has an additional strong argument on its side: should acquisitions ever be considered truly final? The purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp were made 13 and 11 years ago respectively, and went through the standard regulatory review process at the time. If that outcome can be reversed at any point — even more than a decade later — there is a risk that no one will dare to complete any business deals at all.

China has become Apple’s biggest challenge

April 8, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on April 8th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Apple is caught in a squeeze as Trump’s trade tariffs hit the tech giant’s manufacturing hard. China has swiftly moved from being Apple’s most important partner — to becoming its Achilles heel.

“Designed in California. Assembled in China.”

If you use an Apple product, it is quite possible that this small phrase is engraved on the back. The symbolism is crystal clear. Apple is an American company, but its manufacturing takes place in other — substantially cheaper — countries. It is a textbook example of how globalisation has functioned and created unimaginable value for the American tech giant.

As Donald Trump’s trade tariffs are about to take effect, Apple’s close ties to China have rapidly become an enormous problem.

That relationship with China was previously Apple CEO Tim Cook’s greatest achievement at the company. He was previously chief operating officer under founder Steve Jobs, and was the person who established both the contacts and the large-scale manufacturing operations in the country.

As the relationship developed, China also grew into an important sales market, now accounting for around 17 percent of Apple’s total revenue. Apple would not be in the position it is today — the world’s most highly valued company — were it not for China and Tim Cook’s careful and pragmatic management of the relationship.

Now that same relationship has become Apple’s greatest challenge.

Equity analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities describes Apple as the tech company that will be hit hardest by the trade tariffs. “The tariff economic Armageddon that Trump has unleashed is a complete disaster for Apple given its massive exposure to manufacturing in China,” Ives writes. A clearer assessment of the situation is hard to find.

That China could come to pose a problem for Apple has been known for some time. The company has therefore diversified among its manufacturing partners, investing heavily in India among other places. Around 15 percent of all iPhones are now manufactured there. A large proportion of those phones were intended to be sold on the Indian market itself, but given that the US tariff against India is 26 percent (compared with 54 percent against China), reports are now emerging that Apple is trying to significantly increase production in India.

Another theoretical option would be to try to produce iPhones in the United States. In February, Trump took credit for Apple having said it would invest 500 billion dollars in the US over a ten-year period. The majority of that investment had, however, already been pledged before Trump won the election. And the commitment is directed towards more advanced and specialised manufacturing — not ordinary phones, which remain the company’s by far most important product.

But even if Apple could move iPhone production to the United States, what would that look like in practice? The Wall Street Journal examined precisely this scenario and concluded that merely assembling the phone — with all components already in place and ready — would cost approximately ten times more to do in the United States than in China. A cost increase from 300 to 3,000 kronor per iPhone.

And if the company were then also required to manufacture every individual component in the US, the costs would quickly become astronomical. Bear in mind, too, that this unrealistic scenario already assumes that the factories would be up and running and the workforce trained and ready. It goes without saying: this is not going to happen any time soon. Perhaps never.

The irony for Apple is that it had prepared for the possibility of China becoming a problem. The thinking at the time was probably more along the lines of geopolitical risk becoming too great, or Chinese domestic interests no longer aligning with Apple’s needs. Now the threat is coming from inside the United States instead.

The trade tariffs cut straight across Apple’s entire strategy. If the company is forced to sell an iPhone with the American tariffs applied, the production cost rises from around 5,500 kronor to roughly 8,500 kronor per phone. The final price to consumers tends to be about double the production cost. How many people would be willing to pay that?

In a heated trade war between two of the world’s largest countries, it is the company that has benefited most from globalisation that also stands to lose most when trade now comes crashing down. Apple is caught between two global superpowers — and it is going to be painful.

The weak point — where the EU can hit back

April 4, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on April 4th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Stock markets are deep in the red as the world tries to understand how the new tariffs will hit. Caught in the middle are the American tech giants — whose global operations are now under threat.

With a combined market capitalisation of well over 120,000 billion kronor, the chiefs of the largest American tech companies had gathered to watch Donald Trump be sworn in as president again. It was late January 2025, and it would be hard to find a clearer image of the twenty-first century’s new economy.

Little did those executives realise that less than three months later, the country would have a trade policy more reminiscent of the late nineteenth century.

Rarely has such a sharp contrast arisen between the way tech giants conduct their global operations and the protectionism that Trump is now introducing with his trade tariffs.

Apple is an American company headquartered in the small city of Cupertino, about an hour south of San Francisco in California. More than half of all its sales take place outside North and South America, with 25 percent coming from Europe. Its products are manufactured to a very large extent by partners in China, and it has in recent times expanded significantly in both India and Vietnam.

Such is the complex global reality and market of this American company. And it is far from alone.

Virtually the entire world — countries, pension savers, and companies — is now trying to understand how the new tariffs will affect them. And they have very little time to prepare. The first tariffs start this weekend, and the rest follow in the middle of next week. The globalisation that placed the US at the centre of the world economy suddenly looks shakier than ever.

Once the initial shock settles, plans for retaliation will be drawn up. The EU immediately came out and stated that it would need to “support our manufacturing industry” — but also that by the end of April it would be targeting “all goods and services.”

The word “services” is particularly significant. When Trump and the US calculate what they perceive as an imbalance in trade, they have only looked at goods. This is, as noted, a very classical view of economics — one that would fit rather more comfortably a couple of centuries ago. For while a typical car sold might carry a profit margin of around 5 to 10 percent, the services company Meta — which owns Facebook and Instagram — had a profit margin of over 43 percent in its most recent quarter. But none of these services are counted in Trump’s model that dictates the tariffs.

This is almost certainly where the EU will strike back hardest. And virtually all of the tech executives who stood on Trump’s stage in January will be affected. Operations such as Amazon’s AWS, Google’s advertising, and Netflix are likely to find themselves directly in the crosshairs. Virtually all of Europe’s digital infrastructure for work and leisure runs on American services. We watch videos on Instagram, chat with colleagues on Slack, and hold meetings on Microsoft Teams. Americans, for their part, use very few European services. They may listen to music on Spotify — but further examples are hard to find. The asymmetry makes this an especially well-suited area for the EU to exploit.

Even if Trump’s rhetoric suggests otherwise, it is often difficult to find clear winners in a trade war. If the EU imposes punitive tariffs on digital services, the profit margins of American tech companies will take a hit. But the price of your Netflix subscription will likely increase too. Your pension savings — heavily influenced by American tech stocks — will be negatively affected. And this has only just begun.

The mere prospect of where this could lead has sent stock markets into a tailspin. On Thursday, over 3,000 billion kronor was wiped from Apple’s market capitalisation as American Nasdaq had its worst day in five years. The last time things were this bad, the world had just begun to grasp the effects of COVID-19. Investment bank JP Morgan raised its assessment of the risk of a global recession to 60 percent — up 20 percentage points from before Trump’s tariff announcement. China responded on Friday with 34 percent tariffs against the US.

The United States wants to drive investment at home through re-industrialisation and a focus on domestic production. But a large part of the country’s economy is locked into a globalised world that cannot be restructured quickly — or perhaps at all. You cannot move factories halfway around the globe. And even if you could, the result would be sharply higher costs for identical products.

Even patriotic business leaders in the United States have now been given serious pause for thought. One can be in principle supportive of the idea of a strong domestic market that takes care of itself. But the reality is that many American companies are locked into a globalised world that has made them both extraordinarily successful — and dependent on the rest of the world. And the tech executives in particular must be wondering what on earth they have got themselves into.