The rise of Sweden's super rich

On Lidingö island there are huge red and yellow wooden villas on rocky cliff tops, and white minimalist mansions with floor to ceiling windows.

Less than half an hour's drive from Stockholm city centre, this is one of Sweden's wealthiest neighbourhoods.

Serial entrepreneur Konrad Bergström flicks the light switch in his wine cellar, to reveal the 3,000 bottles he's got stored there. "French Bordeaux, that's what I love," he says, flashing a bright white smile.

Elsewhere, there's an outdoor pool, a gym upholstered in reindeer leather, and a workshop-come-nightclub, complete with a large metal urinal.

"I have a lot of musical friends, so we play a lot of music," explains Bergström. He made his money co-founding businesses including a headphones and speaker company, and this home is one of four properties he owns in Sweden and Spain.

It's not a surprising lifestyle for a successful entrepreneur, but what might surprise global observers is how many people have become as wealthy as Mr Bergström - or even richer - in Sweden - a country with a global reputation for its leftist politics.

Although a right-wing coalition is currently in power, the nation has been run by Social Democrat-led governments for the majority of the last century, elected on promises to grow the economy in an equitable way, with taxes funding a strong welfare state.

In 1996, there were just 28 people with a net worth of a billion kronor or more (around $91m or £73m at today's exchange rate), according to a rich list published by former Swedish business magazine Veckans Affärer. Most of them came from families that had been rich for generations.

BBC World Service - The Documentary Podcast, Super-rich Swedes

By 2021, there were 542 "kronor billionaires", according to a similar analysis by daily newspaper Aftonbladet, and between them they owned a wealth equivalent to 70% of the nation's GDP, a measure of the total value of goods and services in the economy.

Sweden - with a population of just 10 million - also has one of the world's highest proportions of "dollar billionaires" per capita. Forbes listed 43 Swedes worth $1bn or more in its 2024 rich list.

That equates to around four per million people, compared to about two per million in the US (which has 813 billionaires - the most of any nation - but is home to more than 342 million people).

"This has come about in a sort of a stealthy way - that you haven't really noticed it until after it happened," says Andreas Cervenka, a journalist at Aftonbladet, and author of the book Greedy Sweden, in which he explores the steady rise of Sweden's super rich.

"But in Stockholm, you can see the wealth with your own eyes, and the contrast between super rich people in some areas of Stockholm and quite poor people in other parts."

Journalist and author Andreas Cervenka is an expert on Sweden's super rich

One reason for the rise of the new super rich is Sweden's thriving tech scene. The country has a reputation as the Silicon Valley of Europe, having produced more than 40 so-called unicorn start-ups - companies worth more than $1bn - in the past two decades.

Skype and Spotify were founded here, as well as gaming firms King and Mojang. More recent global success stories include the financial tech start-up Tink, which Visa acquired for around $2bn during the pandemic, healthcare company Kry, and the e-scooter company Voi.

At Epicenter - a shared office and community space with a giant glass atrium - veteran entrepreneur Ola Ahlvarsson traces this success back to the 1990s. He says a tax rebate on home computers in Sweden "wired or connected all of us much faster than other countries".

A serial co-founder himself, he also points to a strong "culture of collaboration" in the start-up scene, with accomplished entrepreneurs often becoming role models for - and investors in - the next generation of tech companies.

Sweden's size makes it a popular test market, too. "If you want to see if it works on a larger market, you can - at limited cost and without too much risk for your brand or for your stock price - try things here," says Mr Ahlvarsson.

But Mr Cervenka argues there is another narrative that deserves more attention - monetary policies which he says have helped transform the country into a paradise for the super rich.

Sweden had very low interest rates from the early 2010s until a couple of years ago. This made it cheap to borrow money, so Swedes with cash to spare often chose to invest in property, or high risk investments like tech start-ups, many of which shot up in value as a result.

"One of the big factors that's driven this huge increase in billionaires is that we've had, for a number of years, quite a strong inflation in the value of assets," says Mr Cervenka.

Although top earners in Sweden are taxed more than 50% of their personal incomes - one of the highest rates in Europe - he argues that successive governments - on the right and left - have adjusted some taxes in a way that favours the rich.

The country scrapped wealth and inheritance taxes in the 2000s, and tax rates on money made from stocks and pay outs to company shareholders are much lower than taxes on salaries. The corporate tax rate has also dropped from around 30% in the 1990s to around 20% - slightly lower than the European average.

"You don't have to move out of Sweden if you're a billionaire today. And actually, some billionaires are moving here," says Mr Cervenka.

Back on Lidingö island, Konrad Bergström agrees that Sweden has "a very favourable tax system if you are building companies". However he says his wealth has a positive impact because his businesses - and homes - provide employment for others.

"We have a nanny and we have a gardener and cleaners… and that also gives more jobs. So we shouldn't forget about how we're building the society."

Mr Bergström points out that wealthy Swedish entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are also increasingly reinvesting their money in so-called "impact" start-ups, which have a focus on improving society or the environment.

In 2023, 74% of all venture capital funding to Swedish start-ups went to impact companies. This the highest percentage in the EU, and far above the European average of 35%, according to figures from Dealroom, which maps data on start-ups.

Perhaps the country's most high profile impact investor is Niklas Adelberth, who co-founded the unicorn payments platform Klarna. In 2017, he used $130m of his fortune to launch the Norrsken Foundation, an organisation that supports and invests in impact companies.

"I don't have the habits of a billionaire in terms of having a yacht or a private jet or anything like that," says Mr Adelberth. "This is my recipe for happiness."

But others argue that Sweden is missing a nuanced public debate about billionaire wealth, beyond a good-bad dichotomy of how entrepreneurs are spending their fortunes.

Recent research from Örebro University concluded that the media image of Swedish billionaires is predominantly positive, and suggested that their fortunes are rarely explained in the context of the nation's shifting economic policies.

"As long as the super-rich are seen to embody the ideals of the neoliberal era, such as hard work, taking risks, and an entrepreneurial attitude, the inequality behind this is not questioned," says media researcher Axel Vikström.

Mr Cervenka adds that debates about taxing the super rich are not as pronounced in Sweden as they are in many other western countries, such as the US.

"That's sort of a paradox. One would think that with our background - being perceived as a socialist country - this would be top of mind," says the author. "I think it has to do with [the fact] that we have become more of a mentality of 'winner takes it all'.

"That, if you just play your cards right, you can also become a billionaire… And that's quite a significant shift, I think, in Swedish mentality."

Sweden's rich list also reveals that the nation's wealth remains largely concentrated in the hands of white men, despite the country's large immigrant population and decades of policies championing gender equality.

"Yes, it's where people can create new money, create new wealth, but it's still very closed and the double standards are quite high in terms of who gets their ideas funded," says Lola Akinmade, a Nigerian-Swedish novelist and entrepreneur. "Sweden is an incredible country that's a leader in many ways, but there's still a lot of people excluded from the system."

-bbc