Founders - #377 Expanding A Family Dynasty: Marcus Wallenberg Jr.

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

Marcus Wallenberg Jr's impact on Swedish industry was so substantial that during the 1970s, Wallenberg family businesses employed about 40% of Sweden's industrial workforce and represented 40% of the total worth of the Stockholm stock market. The Wallenberg family is one of the most fascinating family dynasties you could read about. The family has survived — and continues to thrive — for 170 years. In a family full of talented entrepreneurs and investors Marcus Wallenberg Jr. stands out. This episode is what I learned from reading Furthering A Fortune: Marcus Wallenberg Swedish Banker and Industrialist by Ulf Olsson.----Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save more. ----Vesto: All of your company's financial accounts in one view. Connect and control all of your business bank accounts from one dashboard. Go to Vesto and schedule a demo with the founder Ben. Tell him David sent you. ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book---- ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

There's two ideas in this book that are repeated Marcus wallenberg junior prioritize investing in technology and surrounding yourself with great people that is actually something that multiple generations of the wallenberg's would repeat. And i've been telling you that there's a lot of similarities i notice between people like steve jobs and jeff bezos and jensen wong last week and now it add marcus wallenberg junior to that list as well. And now I would add Marcus Wallenberg Jr. to that list as well. And it starts with Jeff Bezos's very first shareholder where Jeff Bezos emphasizes the importance of having the very best team. He wrote, setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon success. You will hear Marcus Wallenberg Jr. say something very similar to that. Jeff's focus on talent is very similar to this quote

that I actually found that Steve Jobs gave in an interview that very same year in 1997. This is what Steve said. He says, I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people are to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people. The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between the average quality and the best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed the dynamic range between the average quality and the best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in I noticed the dynamic range between what the average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one. Given that you are well advised to go after the cream of the cream. You want to build a team that pursues the A-plus players. That is exactly what ramp did. ramp has the most

talented technical team in their industry becoming an engineer ramp is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, they hired only point to 3% of the people that applied when you use ramp. It means you have the top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24 seven to automate and improve all of your businesses, financial operations. And they do this all on a single platform. That means the longer that you use ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. In the end of that interview, Steve jobs added one thing he said a small team of a plus

players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. From a customer's perspective, what does a team of A plus players sound like? It sounds like this customer review that I read, which says that Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check in on because they have it handled. As you're about to hear,

Marcus Wallenberg Jr. pushes all of his companies to invest in technology that provide massive productivity gains. If he was alive today, he would use Ramp. Ramp's website is incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. One more thing I want to tell you about before we jump into this episode is Vesto. A lot of my friends are using Vesto to see all of their company accounts in one view. So Vesto helps you connect and control all of your business bank accounts

from one dashboard. I know the founder Ben, I'm friends with them. We spent a bunch of time together. We've had dinner, we've gone on walks, and I've offered to help him by introducing him to some of my other friends that I thought would benefit from using Vesto. So I called one of my friends and he said, listen, David, I will meet anyone that you want me to, but I will tell you, I have to tell you that we say no to over 90% of the software that we're pitched. And yet a week later I hear back and he said that Ben and Vesto are great and that they signed up. So I asked them, can you please ask your team to explain the benefits that they get from Vesto in their own

words? So I'm going to read this text message exchange where his team now in his own words, or in their own words rather, are telling me and you what the benefit is that they get from Vesto. It says, it provides us the ability to view all of our bank accounts and loan accounts on one platform with a single sign on. It makes it much easier to grant access to users in one place as opposed to 20 different banks. So I text back, what did they do before Vesto? And this was the response. We have 20 plus different bank logins

across five accountants. We literally use 21 banks. So every bank has an account and a loan that multiple people need access and views to. Just to log in and see everything would take hours and all be in different tabs. So if you have multiple businesses, if you have multiple accounts, go to Vesto.com and schedule a demo with the founder, Ben and tell him David sent you that is Vesto with a V Vesto.com.

The link will also be down in the show notes. And now let's get to the episode. Daniel Eck, the founder of Spotify was kind enough to invite me to come to Sweden. And since I was going to go to Sweden, I figured I'd want to read and learn more about the most powerful family in Sweden. It's the Wallenberg family. It's actually a 170-year-old family dynasty. So the book that I want to talk to you about today is called Furthering a fortune Marcus Wallenberg, Swedish banker and industrialist, and is written by Ulf Osen. So Marcus Wallenberg Jr. was known as MW. So that's I'm going to refer to him throughout the entire conversation that you and I are going to have. I do want to jump right into his life. I do think there's a few things I should like some background I should give you about the Wallenberg family because he's the third generation. And there's just a couple of ideas that I think were laid like the

foundation laid very early in the very early days of the family dynasty that Marcus definitely built upon. Although as you see, he was fine with the responsibility of continuing the tradition and expanding the dynasty, but he was much more of an, like an innovator than an administrator as somebody, you know, born wealthy. uh, you might suspect that, okay, we're already rich. We're kind of just going to maintain it. He was not interested in that. He was interested in technology, innovation, and drastically expanding the family fortune.

Now there is a couple of ideas that he never deviated from. So there, there's a line at the very beginning of the book where, uh, his actual uncle says long experience in this bank has taught us that we must almost exclusively put our trust in ourselves. So the Wallenbergs, and this is mentioned multiple times throughout the book, they always had more liquidity than other banks and they did never wanted to put themselves or find themselves in a position where they had to rely on the kindness of outsiders. I don't think you survive and thrive really for 170 years without being relatively conservative

and having like this financial fortress. Remember this for later on because when MW is a young man, his job, one of the jobs in the bank and the family bank is the fact that he was handling all the loans for Ivar Kruger, which I covered all the way back on episode 348, which was the biggest one of the biggest maybe the biggest financial scandal and financial collapse, definitely in Sweden's history, but in economic history in general. And it is due to the conservative and prudent nature of the

Wallenbergs and what they taught, you know, the third generation, that they wind up, I'll tell you about this later, but it's pretty crazy. They actually held more collateral from Kruger than liabilities, where a lot of other banks and the main competitor for the Wallenberg family was actually his life and work was destroyed by his association with Ivar Kruger. So this idea is like, hey, you want to have a ton of liquidity, uh, more liquidity than the other banks. And you don't want to put yourself in a position where you have to

rely on the kindness of outsiders. Another thing that is in the book. And I also got to meet while I was in Sweden, some people that had worked. With the Wallenbergs for many, many years. And this came up over and over again, the fact that the family rarely, if ever sold in many cases, there's a bunch of problems in the businesses that they own or they invest in. And they wound up owning these for decades, in some cases over a century. And what they found is like in time, a lot of these problems can be solved or work themselves out.

Uh, so it says the bank did not content itself. And when you hear the bank, you really have to think of the family, which again, there was no difference between the way Marcus thought about it, the way his father, the rest of the family thought about it. There's no difference between the bank and the family, the business and the family. The family is a business, the business is a family. The bank did not content itself with writing off the lending losses, but continue to maintain its interest in its debtor companies in an attempt to rescue them and at some future date, recover as much of the bad debts as possible. So again, I wanted to bring that up right up because they did this before MW was born.

And you'll see MW does this and he actually carries on the tradition and really rescues restructures, combines a bunch of companies that the family owned for an extremely long period of time. Before MW was born, before he played a role in fact in the family business, the family bank, there's multiple examples where they tell, the Wallenberg family tells the employees that are working for them that this is a family business, it will be owned and controlled by the family.

And again, they repeat that we must endeavor to build up as large reserves as possible in the bank. And in case you're listening to this, you want to perpetuate a family dynasty. I'm not going to talk about the patriarch of the family, uh, that the founder of the family dynasty, his name's A.O. Wallenberg, but in case you're interested in perpetuating family dynasty, you might want to have lots of kids cause A.O. Wallenberg had 21 kids. So I want to jump right into MW's life.

And you're going to see traits that he had when he was a kid that he continued his entire life. Uh, they call there's a, there's a funny line in the book where he said that MW was a self-confident five-year-old. Uh, he showed signs of being argumentative and strong-willed from a very early age. He had a great need for independence and control. Remember, he's a kid. He's like this his whole life. And he was way more defiant than his siblings. They also said that he often got his own way, thanks to his charm and powers of persuasion. So the family has essentially set up a track for all

of the kids very early on, which for the most part, MW agrees to, he's like, yeah, okay, my, my, my fate, my destiny is to work in the family business and to perpetuate this dynasty. But he's also going to have input and really push back on his father, even though he had a great relationship with his father. But I want to give you an idea of like the kind of family we're dealing with where they really, there was no ceiling on their ambition or what they thought they could do. So they actually, the school after he does some brief military training and W is gonna go to school

this the school is the Stockholm School of Economics and it's created by his family and The way I was thinking about this is when you when I went back and you know I reread my highlights over and over again before I sit down to talk to you and the second or third or fourth time I read this section. I was oh, you know what? What's really happening the way I think about what's happening is the Wallenberg family is starting this business school, right? As a way to grow the entire pie and then take a percentage of that growing pie. So what I mean by that growing the pie, they're interested in making more business people. So they make more businesses. If there's more businesses, then they're going to own equity in some of those businesses and then have a relationship, the family bank is going to have

a relationship with those businesses. And MW's uncle was the one that started it. And he says, it is for knowledge and training that will raise the members of the commercial sector from the level of shopkeepers and merchants and allow them to attain the position of respect that they occupy in other countries, trying to build a more sophisticated financial and business base inside Sweden. He said, this is my first, last and only wish with this whole idea was to promote merchant trade. And so then I got to bring up for the first time and it won't be the last time.

There's a bunch of very, really important personal traits that I think MW had. It's mentioned, you know, when he was that I think MW had it's that's mentioned You know when he was a kid teenager when he's 80 and he's still pushing the pace and outrunning Many of the young people around him is this massive competitive drive this insane level of energy He's constantly wanting to push things forward He was addicted to technological change and investing in technology up until the day he dies technological change and investing in technology up until the day he dies. But what you realize is that he, the way he approached business, he approached everything that he did.

And so one of his great loves, really the one love he had in his life was business. Outside of business though, was tennis to the point where, you know, he becomes the Swedish doubles champion and he plays at Wimbledon for God's sake, but there's nothing that he does that I would say that he does on like a recreational level. He was not trying to be amateurist at all. In fact, he took the same intensity he applied to tennis, he applied to his work and the same intensity applied to his work, he applied to his tennis. He's very intense, he's energetic, he's disciplined, he's physically fit, and he's very consistent. So it talks about the fact that he would engage in intense physical training. So it's a tennis involved

physical training, which made him conscious of the importance of taking regular exercise. He never abandoned his habit of doing physical exercises every morning, which stood him up in good stead for the hectic pace he would keep throughout his life. Later in life, he once subscribed himself as a sportsman who would become a bank manager in his later days. An important explanation of his successes in various fields was his intense competitive drive. He loved to compete and believed in competition as a principle for development and progress in business and in life. And so one of my favorite parts about the book is the fact that there's all these letters in the book back and forth between MW and his father. the book is the fact that there's all these letters in the book

back and forth between MW and his father and you see the advice that his father has how MW kind of pushes back but one Thing that he doesn't push back and I think this is actually good if you're born into a situation like he is He writes to his father at the time MW is about 21 years old and he knew that he was gonna go into the family bank Right now he's gonna expand it way past finance and go. He really thought of himself much more as like an industrialist. He was much more interested in industry than it was finance, but he writes to his father something that's very interesting. And I think there's a side idea here that you and I can benefit from. He says, I do grant you father that you were right about my career being determined.

There is but one possibility to make progress, to gain knowledge, in other words, to go forward. So at the very end of the book, there's a line in the book that says MW was not given to introspection. This is one of, surprisingly, like one of the most controversial observations that I have just about reading all these books. Many of the great founders, once that they know what they want to do, I would argue that they actually have very low levels of introspection to like almost no introspection. And the reason that is important is because low introspection equals more action. And you see the importance of action and moving forward with the way he ends that letter. These are very, you know, Swedish people are very typically very reserved. I was shocked at how many of the letters that MW is writing and he just used exclamation

points way more than I expected. And he ends that letter to his father forward exclamation point. And one thing that MW did not have to think about was that the family was something that his father taught him and that his father's father taught him was that the family in the bank were one in the same thing. And that's definitely how MW thought about it. Now, once you're done with your military training, now you've finished with the Stockholm School of Economics. This was very fascinating. He's like, OK, I'm going to map out.

You can't just come into the bank. We're not just going to give you a position of authority or put you right in the top. The way the family trained the next generation I absolutely loved and I've seen a few times to they insisted that they have to learn from the ground up when I want to read to you if you listen to a few weeks ago when I covered. The two biographies of Hedy green who was a single largest individual financier in the world time. The way that she wanted to train her son, the next generation, you know, because Hattie Green was fifth generation, she'd be her family was rich for five generations before her. She said, Okay, I want you to learn the railroads. And you're going to learn it. You know, even though I own the railroad, I could make you

CEO anytime I wanted or president or want. No, you're not gonna do that. You're gonna walk the goddamn tracks. You are going to literally going to pull weeds and clean up, you're going to do every single job you're going to learn from the ground up. So what MW's father does is first of all, they have phenomenal network, just wait till I read the banks that he's going to become a trainee at. But they he literally starts in the mail room, he starts doing the lowest level possible success. His father had already started to plan the next step in his son's carefully mapped out career period, periods of training with foreign banks. The work was monotonous with all the manual duties that formed part of everyday

banking at the time, such as sorting, checking, counting, and writing everything by hand it provided, but this is why he's doing this for a son. It provided a basic insight to the workings of the financial system. So MW's father is sending them all over the world training in all these other banks, see how they do it, right? He's doing it. So he learns from the ground up, but he's also, this is something that is repeated over and over again. It's this maxim that I've said to you before, relationships run the world. His father talks about the fact that personal contacts were actually even more important and even more important reason for training abroad. And I think Marcus

Wallenberg Sr. would agree with that. Over and over again, he's talking about you need to prioritize the personal contacts. I'm going to read this great advice that he gives to his son again, appearing in one of these letters that go back and forth between father and son throughout the book. It is necessary to behave in a way befitting a well-managed member of an established family. to his son, again, appearing in one of these letters that go back and forth between father and son throughout the book, it is necessary to behave in a way befitting a well-managed member of an established family. When M.W. was about to leave London, his father stressed how important it was

to clear out in a decent way. You should pay visits or write to all those who have shown you some kindness. The most lasting relationships are created through paying attention and showing gratitude. You should take a couple of extra days doing that. So it is when MW is in his early twenties that his dad sends him all over the world to study and to train in a bunch of different banks. Now I'm going to just give you this list because this is remarkable and it really

does speak to the relationships that the Wallenberg family cultivated and they did so over generations and they still do that. So he trains, MW is going to study and train in Pique Tay, which is in Switzerland. This bank still exists 220 years after founding. Then he's going to go move on to Lazard, or Lazard maybe in London that was founded 176 years ago. In this bookshelf behind me, I have a company history of the Lazard bank or Lazard bank that I'll eventually get to. He then goes to Brown brothers in New York and then credit Lyonnais in Paris.

And one thing that would have been obvious to MW about the fact that relationships on the road during his training was the fact that Lazard, they actually, because of their long established relationships with the Wallenberg family and the SEB, which is the family bank, they, Marcus Wallenberg senior was actually able to persuade them to persuade the management of the bank to take his son on as a trainee, which was totally against the bank's procedures and principles. And so up until this point, MW has kind of followed the path that his dad wanted him

to embark on. And then we that his dad wanted him to embark on and then we see his dad finds out really early, and he probably knew this from when he was a kid, that he's going to exert his own will. And so he writes to his dad, hey, guess what? I met a woman, I love her, and I'm getting married. And so obviously, if you're trying to perpetuate a family dynasty, who your kids marry is extremely important. So there's a series of letters that go back and forth about this impending marriage and again I'm going to cover to the chase

like MW now and throughout his entire life is going to get what he wants he is not going to be allow himself to be controlled by anybody but there is fascinating where you see his father really trying to counsel his son and just how he thinks like he's writing letters on about how he actually thinks about marriage that you know when you're in your early 20s you're not gonna have this perspective and so his father writes is the most natural thing in the world that a young man takes a fancy to a young lady however it's important to decide whether or not his fancy shall be decisive for the rest of his life when, one tends to believe in the one and only chance. Experience will modify this opinion. A marriage is not only based upon a fancy. Once the first

outburst of emotion has passed, a happy marriage requires a common outlook on life, shared interest, as well as mutual respect and tolerance." And then true to his personality, when M.W. writes to his father about wanting to get married, he essentially just presented as a fit of complete like. This i'm making this decision it's going to happen when it does happening but again his father writes him in return he says. I'm gonna prove you know of your decision but the approval the approvals not given without reservation so he says i approve your decision congratulate you wholeheartedly. reservation so he says I approve your decision and congratulate you wholeheartedly however I do consider that a deferment is appropriate so that both parties have time for reflection I'm more than happy to see my boys getting married and continuing our esteemed family experience shows that is important not to make the wrong choice and be misled by one's feelings further reflection

is recommended and then marriage is not the only place that he's going to push back on his father again. He's he was MW from time he's young till time he's old. He's was way more interested in industry than he is finance. So he's like, okay, I've studied in these banks. I don't want to see the banks anymore. I want to go out and see companies building things. So his argument to his father was our own bank is heavily engaged in industry, it would therefore be better to spend a month and a half gaining experience in an iron foundry, an iron foundry, a company in a forestry sector and an electrical company. After that, I could complete my bank training and

then go to the United States and visit more iron, steel and electrical industries in the United States. MW felt it necessary to demonstrate a certain amount of independence towards his father. After all, should not MW himself ultimately take the decision on his own future?" So the book talks a lot about what they call the Wallenberg family sphere, which I absolutely love that description. And in the most simple terms, it is the bank, the holding company, which is called Investor AB, which is founded in 1916, is public and still exists to this day.

In fact, it is the second largest company in Sweden behind Spotify. And then what I would call the family office, which is really a complex web of companies and holding companies that manage the family fortune. You can actually see some of this structure on the family's website. It's wallenberg.com but it's important for me to point out that this is a very like oversimplified way to think about it because they're they have just a huge network of companies and you'll see this is as we continue to go through the book. Just how complicated and get but I want to read the section to you because this was what was taking place when MW starts his career in the family business. It is important to remember that the banking business was only one of the fields of activity in which the Wallenberg group was engaged. There were at least two other principal activities which came under the family umbrella. The family was directly involved in industrial ownership,

first through the rehabilitation of weaker companies in order to recover loan losses from their bank. Secondly, in the development of new companies that had the potential of becoming valuable customers of the bank in the future. Much of their industrial activity was carried out through the holding company AB Investor, again, the one that still exists to this day, and its subsidiaries backed by SEB, which is the family's bank, backed by SEB's capital resources. And this is a key point here. Although dominated by the Wallenberg family, the investor group of companies was formally

kept separate from the bank. So their bank and their main holding company is technically separate, but they still control both. A third line of business alongside the banking and industrial operations was the management of the family's assets. Considerable growth was also achieved by the use of finance and holding companies that could carry on financial activities on a larger scale using techniques not normally found in banking. That's why they have all these holding companies. These companies were known as quote unquote associated companies, which meant that they

were formerly independent of the bank, but we're still closely linked to it. Many of them were foreign companies enjoying tax and foreign exchange advantages. And the reason I think it's so important to like try to simplify the family sphere, which you know, you have the initial source of the family's wealth being the bank, the way they grow the wealth being the holding company. And then you have all the private, you know,

the family office per se of the actual, like the management of the family's assets. And I think those are the three primary like components of the actual like the management of the family's assets and I think those are three primary Like components of the sphere now There's probably an unlimited amount of companies within them like let me give you a perfect example of why I think would be so difficult to actually put it put a Actual price on like how much wealth does this family have any and this goes for you know Anything that's been compounding for a long period of time. So later on in the book, they're fighting with the eventual Nazi government in Germany over one of their assets. And to me, this is the perfect example of just how complicated and how widespread their family

sphere went. So the Wallenberg family owns a plantation in Ecuador. That plantation in Ecuador is run by a German limited liability company. But the main the principal owner and the main shareholders is the Wallenberg family in Sweden. So an Ecuadorian plantation run by Germans owned by sweets. And so 300 pages into this book when you're reading about all these different companies, I mean, MW is going to sit he's on 80 different boards. He's like the chairman of board like 30 something companies, I think we'll get to that a little bit. But the note I left myself when I got to this section is like, how many companies did they own? It's almost impossible

to know. And so that brings us to two main reoccurring themes is the fact that MW wants control and he has an older brother and there's going to be a lifelong tension with his brother. In fact, he said later on that whenever he decided anything in his brother's absence his brother would then come to the next meeting and Try to change it immediately So there's gonna be a bunch of conflict between those two for control throughout their entire lives And WMW is the one that winds up winning that battle the second thing that Is something that reoccurs over and over again in this story in his life is the fact that he was Extremely interested in technology again, he did not view himself.

You know, he was not an administrator. He was an innovator. That's was really important to him. He stressed in his talks and in his management of his companies on the importance of technology, he says, I imagine that economics quite simply means making use of technology. It is always possible to build up new industries on the basis of inventions. We can only express the hope that we shall see new epoch-making inventions emanating

from Sweden that will be the benefit of the world." And then his next sentence is why that was important to him and then to his family. If that comes about, we may rest assured that the necessary capital for their exploitation would be made available within Sweden from the Wallenberg family and from the Wallenberg family bank. So let me actually give you a practical example of this, of the idea of moving into a place where there's technological headwinds, okay, and this idea that I mentioned earlier that they rarely if ever sell and they wind up

just having a very long-term point of view. And a lot of the problems that they have inside companies because they never sell, they're able to work through given enough time. And so this is really a family case study for how problems should be handled inside of their companies. And one of the most surprising things that I learned from this book is they really try to avoid letting bad investments die. Some people believe that spend all your time on the big winners, kind of cut your losses.

There's really no wrong way for this. Just depends on what you want to do. But the Wallenberg family, they spent a ton of time not letting their bad investments die. And because they have such as long-term horizon, they're able to wait out for better times and opportunities. So, there's this company called Atlas, and it says it's perhaps the best example of the perseverance of the Wallenbergs with regard to its industrial investments.

Within the family, this case has traditionally been regarded as a model of how industrial problems should be handled. This is where MW rapidly learned practical crisis management under the supervision of his father. Atlas was a company that had been founded in 1873 by the patriarch of the family. This is founded by a O Wallenberg in 1873. The reason he started the companies because in 1873, the tech, the main technology of his day was the railroads right so they start atlas for the purpose of producing equipment for a network of railways i'm going to pause there there's another maxim that jumps out when you study this family and that's don't let the money

escape so if you're going to start if if a o wallenberg any wallenberg started a company who do you think is going to be that company's bank. S E B was the Atlas's bank. Atlas became the largest mechanical engineering company in Sweden, taking up a lot of the bank's management's time and entry, as well as a disproportionate share of its loan portfolio. The company's first crisis occurred after the 18 seventies with the decline of the railway industry. So what did they do during the 18 eighties and 1890s?

Atlas was restructured two separate times. So this idea of restructuring, consolidating, and combining is something that the Wallenbergs do over and over again. Remember they're not going to sell. So they wind up changing from producing equipment for railroads into the manufacturing of air operated tools and compressors. So around the time that Atlas switches from railroad equipment to pneumatic air compressor tools. Okay. Marcus Wallenberg, senior MW's dad, they found the Wallenbergs found companies to they make investments, they buy companies, they start companies. He founded a company called AB diesels. The idea was, hey, we're going to manufacture engines based on Rudolf Diesel's patent, right? What they do is they, hey, we're going to actually consolidate Atlas into AB Diesel.

So we're going to combine the companies. That combined company does well for a few years in large part because this is during World War I and there's a huge demand for their products. After the war ends, there's a depression in Sweden that hits both companies very hard. So keep in mind, this is 50 years after the founding of Atlas. They're still in control of the company. They were thinking, okay, maybe we need to close down the business completely. They decide not to do that.

They decide to restructure it and then they have to lay off a bunch of workers. So they go down from about 900 employees down to 300. They restructure the company. They write down the shares. They still have full ownership and control. So it says the family was again prepared to wait for better times. That is a very important line because they have control and because they have financial resources and the long-term, they have a long-term perspective and they always had, they can wait for better times. Now what they realize is, hey, our compressor

and air compressed tools division shows the greatest potential for growth and it's being pulled down by this diesel engine division. And so another thing that you'll see the Wallenbergs do over and over again is that's fine, we're not gonna sell the company, we're just gonna drop that bad business line and then we're gonna find a market that provides tailwinds

and this is what happens. The profits came instead from air operated tools and compressors, a market sector that appeared to be expanding. Before the decade had ended, diesel engine manufacturing had been closed down and the march towards a position for the company as a world leader in the area of pneumatic technology had been initiated by investing in the cutting edge of technology and the international marketplace, NW chose a direction that would in the future be central to his industrial philosophy. Okay, moving on to another idea that the Wallenberg family repeats over and over again, the importance of picking who you associate with carefully.

I'm going to start with an example of somebody that did not do this, and it winds up destroying this guy's life and work. This is the section on Ivar Kruger. It says, Ivar Kruger became very closely associated with Oskar Rydbeck, who had headed this other bank, I'm not even gonna try to pronounce, since 1917, and who was the only person who could really compete with Marcus Wallenberg, Sr. for the title

of Sweden's leading banker during the 1920s. Again, the reason this speaks to the importance of picking who you associate with carefully, Ivar Kruger is going to destroy this guy's life and work. The exact opposite is going to happen to the Wallenberg family. I mentioned earlier that MW managed the Ivar, Ivar Kruger financial disaster extremely well. The family bank had refused to loan Kruger more money before his empire collapsed. And when it did collapse, the bank actually had more collateral than liabilities. I do think Yvar Kruger is very important to study but I already did an episode on him if you're interested in learning more listen to episode

348 which is about this book called the match king Yvar Kruger the financial genius behind a century of wall street scandals and I think in more ways than one the Yvar Kruger collapse actually demonstrates the shrewdness of the way the Wallenbergs operated their business. So not only were they not taken down or destroyed by them, they actually as a result of the collapse of the Kruger empire, the Wallenberg group was drastically expanded. And I'll just give you one example of this. At the time where Kruger dies, some people think it was suicide, some people think he was murdered, but Ericsson was a very, very precarious situation because Kruger was a majority shareholder in Ericsson.

And this again combines with another idea that the Wallenberg has is this extreme long-term outlook and the way the Wallenberg family operates in this really long-term way. They actually still control this company, Ericsson, 100 years later. Ericsson is jointly controlled by the Wallenbergs and this other bank called Handelsbaken and they both acquired their voting strong a shares and thus control Ericsson after the fall of Kruger and so before I move on introduce this idea that they don't let the money escape which is very fat was very fascinating to me. I want to put the notes from the book down real quick. And I want to just give you an update on where the Wallenberg family is today. Says the Wallenberg family is one of Sweden's most prominent business dynasties, controlling a significant sphere. There's that word again, significant sphere of influence in Swedish and Nordic businesses through their investment companies and foundations. The core of their business empire centers around investor a B. This is what I mentioned mentioned earlier it's the second most valuable.

Public company in sweden right now behind spotify so this is the way to describe investor a b is there main investment company founded in nineteen sixteen. Which holds large ownership stakes in major swedish multinational companies like ericsson in telecommunications. Atlas and industrial equipment a ABB in engineering, AstraZeneca in pharmaceuticals, and SEB in banking. The Wallenbergs are known for their long-term investment approach and active ownership style, often placing family members or trusted associates on the boards of companies that they invest in. They emphasize substance over appearance and long-term value creation over short-term gains. I'm going to read one more thing before I go back to the book, which just blew my mind

when I started reading about Marcus Wallenberg Jr. before I read his biography. MW's impact on Swedish industry was so substantial that during the 1970s Wallenberg family businesses employed about 40 percent, a single family employed about 40% of Sweden's industrial workforce and represented 40% of the total worth of the stock market in Sweden. Now I wanted to read that to you because I think this idea and again, I took this idea from the book and just compress it down to a maximum for you and I don't let the money escape is one way they do this. So

your preferred partner, right, you have this network of companies, who knows the cow, even if they're separate legal structures, they're heavily controlled by one family and people that they trust. It's your preferred partner for every single thing should be, should be inside the Wallenberg sphere. So they take control of Ericsson. Okay. They wind up going to the government of Finland and the family bank, SCB says, Hey, we are going to loan you government of Finland, $4 million from our bank so you can then spend that money that came from our bank and give it to Ericsson so they can expand your network, your telecommunications network.

And then Ericsson, you're gonna have an agreement with SCB that we get at least 37.5% of all of your banking business. Don't let the money escape. Their associated companies almost always had to use the family bank. Now without a doubt, since this is the biography of Marcus Wallenberg Jr. of MW, right? He's been the main character.

The supporting character, the most other important character in this book is without a doubt his father. And his father's life motto actually becomes the family's motto and is still to this day. It's on their website over and over again. It's also in this book. It translates from Latin. It is to be, not to seem. And one way he described it to his sons, because he's about to pass away and we're going to

get into really how his sons are now writing back to each other to their friends and to their associates about the impact that their father had in their lives but the way he described it to his sons was it was the importance of being sincere and true to oneself. So this part is absolutely incredible. I want to read the whole thing. I'm going to give you my outline, my notes before I read it to you. Number one, admiration for his father. Number two, the importance of innovating and creating something new. Number three, his idea that we need to be epoch makers. Number four, the traits that MW most admired from his father and number five, the importance of again, this is repeated, they just have a handful of ideas that they repeat over and over again, like everybody else. Surround yourself with great people. This is something the Wallenbergs

repeat. So now MW is writing right after the death of his father. He said, you probably know better than most people what a wonderful father, friend, comrade, and mentor he was and the strength of the ties with which we had developed with him. He has left a great void but his spirit is so strong that it will live on forever among many of us. What MW inherited from his father and turned to his own advantage was the ability to create something new. This is now how MW thought about this. For the sake of civilization, I sincerely hope that the

epoch of bold and constructive innovation has not come to an end with the passing away of my father. Innovation goes on constantly and is stronger than any regulation. The fact that he was often seen as the soul of an epoch or regarded as an epoch maker was probably due to his unusual qualities. Should other men of the same caliber emerge, I believe they will also be seen as epoch makers. MW continues to describe his father.

He was extremely versatile. He had a phenomenal memory and was very knowledgeable in all kinds of sciences and literature. He was extremely versatile. He had a phenomenal memory and was very knowledgeable in all kinds of sciences and literature. He enjoyed music and knew about different technologies and he mastered languages as well. There's all these exclamation points again. I'm really surprised by these very reserved Swedes,

how often MW used exclamation points. I do the same, so I love it. He was very interested in history and would tell stories about his various companies and about the difficulties he had encountered. He was talented, first of all would tell stories about his various companies and about the difficulties he had encountered. He was talented. First of all, in terms of wisdom and intelligence, but he also had great judgment, industriousness, energy,

and he also enjoyed good health and had a sense of responsibility. Really. The reason I'm reading this to you, because he's describing his father, but now that I know the full arc of MW's life, you could use the same description of him as well. He often used to say, I find it difficult not to intervene when I see things going wrong. And one thing that I think is very important is that he was very good at picking good collaborators. And so with the passing of his father, this is not going to surprise you based on the personality and everything you and I have discussed up to this point.

He's going to become, MW is going to become the most prominent and powerful person inside the family, even though he's the second son. That is why the book is called furthering a fortune. And the way he furthers the Wallenberg family fortune is because he had this obsession, not with finance, but with industry. And I'm shocked at how much of the book is covering the restructuring, reviving, and combining of all of the different companies that they quote unquote invest in. But really they're like, I don't think of them as investors. They are very much like operators, almost like co-founders. In a lot of these cases, they're on the board. They wield given it's going to have ups and downs. And he talks about their approach to fixing these ailing companies. So he says, first, the bank's management

examines the company's position, and they identify where the true losses lay. Then with the help of a very realistic approach, a judgment has to be made as to whether the company could be able to succeed if it was given a fresh start. So sometimes that is combining the company. Sometimes that's shedding business units that were not performing as well. Sometimes it means writing it down and recapitalizing it. But then he says then the company's bank, right, this is what I mean about they don't let the money escape, the company's bank must often become involved on a long-term basis. And in the interaction, interaction between the family bank and the company's management, this is what MW says over and over again, the personal element of the relationships

was the greatest importance. He goes back on to why relationships is so important. Let's say we have an ailing company, we've recapitalized it, we've combined, we've got new management, we've done whatever we can. Now what do we do next? To make it grow. The management of the bank,

which you can think of as the family, right? Often committed itself to trying to secure markets meaning customers for the resurgent company through judicious use of our contacts and so here's a description of some of the ways that mw implements and exerts his influence again they believe it wallenberg's believe and mw believe in long-term and active investments. When he became the managing director of the bank, he was able to mobilize all of its resources. He established a system of active ownership. What does that mean?

This is what he did. He hired a staff function for the gathering of information, economists and technicians were recruited, a legal department employing professional lawyers was set up, and files on potential managers were kept and so on. So he's essentially helping them recruit as well. When you go through this whole section, I was trying to summarize all the different things that he was doing here. It's like, wait a minute, this guy sets up a business inside of a business, which is

the bank that is in the business of managing businesses. That's really what he did. That is not a short-term and passive investor. And then he goes about marshaling his leadership and his storytelling abilities because him and his brother have, again, they have this like dynamic tension over and over again. His brother is the administrator, he is the innovator. And so there is a family motto that they would also have is to shift from the old to that which is coming, which we saw.

Remember, go back to the case study on Atlas, right? You have this company founded by A.O. Wallenberg in the 1870s that they then managed and successfully shift from the old, which is the railways, all the way to diesel engines, all the way to being the leading company in pneumatic and air compressor tools. And so he's writing a letter to his brother. And this is what he says. This is he's expressing his views on enterprise and development. Uh, so he says to sell a railway in order to buy into airlines. In other words, to shift from the old to that, which is coming, which has been the motto for the business activities of early generations of our

family is the only tradition worth caring for in which our ancestors would like to see us maintain. MW was not shy. He was a very direct person. He was not shy about saying that he thought he was better suited to take care of the family's industrial traditions. We are expanding not just from a bank. We have all kinds of businesses. These businesses are growing rapidly. This is in between pre and post World War I and pre and post World War II. You have these massive economic explosions. And MW is constantly criticizing. He says his brother is too passive and he's more of an

administrator than an innovator. There was without a doubt a difference in their temperaments. MW was impatient, curious about technology, and untiring in his following up on business matters, whereas Jacob was often analytical, too and and and MW's opinion Frequently delaying decisions and giving freer reign to executive managers and the reason I think this part is so important I wanted to bring out to you not just to talk about the differences personality between the two brothers But what is very obvious think about the description of a five-year-old MW that you and I talked about now You know, he's 40 years old 45 years old where we're on the story He's doing M he's doing.

MW is doing exactly what I feel Charlie Munger would tell him to do, which is you need to follow your natural drift and you see his natural drift manifest through his personality, through his actions. You also see when he plays golf, I love this story. When NW played around a golf, he would aim straight for the green, even if the course were difficult and curving. Jacob preferred to hit two safe strokes. Now remember, MW's father is dead. Go back to the advice that he had his son. Hey, you're young, you're excited, you met this, you know, sexy lady, you have all these feelings, you know, you got to have have all these feelings. You know, you, you gotta have a calm head.

His father's passed away. MW gets a divorce and then he does one of the two of the craziest things I've ever read about. And one indication that his first wife and him were not going to last very long is because one of her favorite, one of his first wife's favorite expressions to repeat is there's more to life than business. Not for MW. Now here's two crazy things.

First of all, MW is going to marry or steal the wife of the king's nephew. Okay. This goes back. Remember he was having a really hard time and I mean, hard time. It wasn't, I guess when I've been trying, he would not, he would have refused like compromise for like conventions sake and his dad, hard time, it wasn't I guess, when I mean, trying, he would not even refuse like compromise for like conventions sake and his dad, you see his dad earlier trying to like, counts his son through letters and conversations,

just like, you know, you're certain things are expected of you, you're kind of acting like, you know, what more will for a little while than than expected. So MW goes on a transatlantic cruise, there's a bunch of people leaving from, from Sweden people leaving from Sweden. They're all going to a wedding in America. And on this cruise, when his wife is pregnant with their third child, by the way, she stays back in Sweden, he meets this woman. This is going to wind up being his new wife. His wife is going to be Marianne Bernadotte. Who knows if I pronounced that correctly. At the time Mary Anne is married to count Carl Bernadotte. Count Carl is the son of Prince Oscar who is the brother of King Gustav the fifth.

So despite the fact that they're both married, right? They went up falling in love and it says they prepared to dissolve their marriages quickly in order to unite and keep in mind divorce says divorce was still unusual men members of the establishment if divorce was frowned upon by the Wallenberg family which it definitely was it was a positive scandal for the Bernadotte family a member of the royal family had been abandoned by his wife and it gets even more awkward MW used to play tennis with the king and now you have just stolen the wife of the king's nephew. Needless to say, I got a good chuckle out of this next sentence. It took some time before MW and his new wife were invited to the royal palace for dinner. That is the first wild thing that he does in his personal life. Here is the second it is very highly likely that

Mw winds up setting up the next marriage for his first wife because Mw's first wife Marries a close associate of the Wallenberg family his ex-wife marries this guy named Charles Hambrough Charles Hambrough is a member of a well-known family of bankers. The Wallenberg Bank owned shares in the Hambrough's Bank and M.W. and Charles knew each other. M.W.'s children would later say, jokingly or not, that their father had probably arranged his wife's second marriage." And I think the thing that ties all this together is really just like MW gets what MW wants. And so he winds up wrestling control of the family bank from his brother and every single thing that he wants to control, whether it's the family's industrial holding company, the bank, any time he wants to control something, he winds up getting control of it.

So from here on in for the rest of his life, he's going to push the pace up until his 80s. He works until he dies. And in fact, he's like training all the young people around him, and they just cannot believe the amount of energy that this guy has. So I want to go over the very unique way, because he really has no regard for convention or just continuing down a path just because somebody else in his family beforehand continued on that path. In everything he does, he injects some kind of new idea. So takes over

the management of the family bank and he institutes this thing called, he calls morning prayers. So he gathers his top people and each of them would give an account of their respective areas of responsibility, report major individual transactions and exchange general information. In this way, MW could keep a breast of developments within the bank and be at the center of the flow of information. So it's kind of like an analog low tech way. If you listen to the Jensen Wong episode I did last week, where both MW and Jensen and a lot of history, they want unimpeded information and a lot of it.

And so Jensen has this idea where he's like, Hey, every single person in the company, you're going to write, I think, once a week, this top five things, this T5T email, right? Top five things. You're going to put it in bullet points. I'm going to read hundreds of them every week, and I'm going to have this unimpeded flow of information. MW's analog version of that is I'm

going to gather all my people together and every real quick. In many cases, they mention the fact that these meetings go really fast, uh, like 15 minutes, uh, and I'm going to get this unimpeded information on a daily basis from the people in my company. Another thing that was very unusual given the industry that they're in and how reserved the family was. MW is the first person that he actually starts advertising the bank's services publicly because

he wants to grow. And so it says in the early, in the early 1950s, the bank, which normally took a low profile with the media, advertised that it was at the service of private enterprise. He starts making the bank invest heavily in technology. And so in the technology of their day, they have these punch card machines. So he buys a bunch of punch card machines and then all, and make sure that all accounting transactions inside of the bank have to be no longer done by hand. They have to be done on the technology of their day, which is the

punch card machines, right? So this result, all accounting transactions were transferred to punch cards, which led to a dramatic increase in efficiency productivity doubled twice as many transactions were carried out by a workforce workforce that only had to increase from 425 employees to 550. So they add, you know, 125 employees, but they do double amount of work because of MW's insistence that you need to invest in technology suit. Cause we want to push these massive increases in productivity that technology enables. And so remember, he wrestled control of the family bank from his older brother, and we're

going to get a lot more details on how he decided to run his business. There's obviously a lot of differences between his brother Jacob and him, but there's also going to be a lot of parallels. When I got to this section, I thought a lot about Steve Jobs and Jensen Wong. So it says MW was a highly visible driving force in the bank. Jacob had adopted a low profile. The employees did not see much of him. MW had a different way of communicating with the staff. He got to know everybody. So I would say he's, MW is a big proponent of management by walking around. He liked to walk around the office asking

what the different employees were doing. The pace of the work in the bank increased. MW would express his dissatisfaction with somebody in front of other people. So remember, just like Jensen was a big proponent of public criticism. Talked about the fact that you should criticize publicly because it should be a learning experience for the entire company. If you criticize privately, only you and that individual employee actually learned the lesson and Jensen was optimizing just like MW is optimizing for the overall learning of the entire company. MW would become

irritated and loses temper but there was a often a sound intention behind his outbursts. He considered it useful for others to understand what it meant to work for him. That reminds me of Jensen as well. Not keeping him informed of what was going on to work for him. That reminds me of Jensen as well. Not keeping him informed of what was going on was a mortal sin. That reminds me of Jensen as well.

It was not up to the subordinate to judge what needed to be reported. Jensen almost says that exact same thing. It's spooky how similar this is. MW himself wanted detailed information even on apparently trivial matters. He wanted to draw the conclusions himself. Reports containing the writer's own reflections he would call half chewed food. Now I had a weird thought that came to mind when I got to this section because this is his reminding me of Steve Jobs would insist on improving every single ad that Apple did

before it went out. And so the people that made the ads in the meetings with Jobs, they would like put the ad in front of them and they try to tell them a story and Jobs would tell them to shut up. It's like, are you going to be there? You know, when I see this billboard or when I'm having coffee on a Sunday morning and seeing this Apple ad in a newspaper and they're like, no, exactly. So be quiet. I want to be able to judge, like draw the conclusions myself.

Another side of MW's leadership style was that once he had told someone off, he would quickly let the matter pass. It did not linger. Now one striking way that MW deviated from both Steve Jobs and Jensen, you know, Steve focused on running Apple the whole time. Jensen focused on running NVIDIA the whole time. Jensen focused on running Nvidia the whole time. MW was the chairman of the board for 33 separate companies and on the board of another 80 companies. His style I would say is much more in line with what Sam Zell said where he set up his all of his companies and everything he was in. Sam said, I am the chairman of everything and the CEO of nothing. There's a couple other things that I just made a list because, you know,

they reappear over and over again. And so I just made a list of how I think about MW's entrepreneurial philosophy. Okay. Number one, he wants to invest in technology. Number two, he wants decisive influence over the company he is working on or investing in. Number three, he's going to impatiently push things forward constantly, which leads to number four, which seems paradoxical. And the paradox is MW's short-term impatience combined with the

long-term perseverance of the Wallenberg family in their industrial matters. The list continues. Number five, the quality of the people is most important. In fact, let me interrupt the list. I want to read the section two and I'll get back to my list when judging companies MW considered that the capacity of its top people was generally the most important ingredient He therefore chose executive managers with great care He kept himself well informed about new names drove his managers extremely hard and moved others Aside if they were not up to the task those of his own generation who had allied themselves closely with him earlier were gradually moved to one side in favor of new blood. He demanded unlimited work and loyalty from his

managing directors and all of his industrial companies. So number five, the quality of the people is most important. Number six, he believed in driving people hard. Number seven, he wanted new blood. And number eight, he had tons of expansive energy for new initiatives. And number nine is one of his favorite sayings that he would repeat. He said ownership without presence rots. Ownership without presence rots. What does he mean? Go in person, be seen, be prepared. Let me just give you a quick example of this. It's also important to him to study industrial operations at firsthand, to forge contacts with onsite personnel

and to be visible. He liked to prepare himself well before his visits and liked to surprise people with unexpected questions, often quite detailed ones. The managing director on the site could never feel absolutely safe, which of course was MW's intention. Here's what a meeting with MW was like from the perspective of one of his company's directors.

This is going to remind you again, Sam Zell, Jay Pritzker, Bernard O'Nall, they have all been described in a similar way that MW is going to be described from one of his directors. Monthly reports, sales statistics, and minutes from meetings were reviewed. MW had a unique talent for putting his finger on the exact figure or point which you had not analyzed sufficiently or about which you did not know all the answers. The outstanding ability he possessed to analyze a report quickly was certainly acquired through a lifelong experience of scrutinizing statistical information and annual reports. He had a unique ability of quickly putting his finger on the weak points and of asking

difficult questions. Again, Sam Zell, Jay Pritzker, Bernard Renau have all been described in that exact same way. Now this is not to say that a lot of, as you can imagine, this kind of domineering personality, it's a very difficult personality. There's going to be a lot of people that love him and there's going to be loyal to him and a lot of people that don't. In fact, one of his main directors in one of the holding companies actually described M.W. as both a great man and a small one. This part I thought was a great description, so I'm going to just read the entire

thing to you and I think it really gives us a sense of, you know, who MW was. His greatness was incontestable and worthy of all of our admiration. It was based on a deep sense of responsibility for Sweden as a country, and in particular for the Swedish economy. He spent all of his expertise, energies, and time on the task of developing and in many cases cases rescuing companies. This was his life, everything, and everybody was subordinated to his mission in life. What do I mean then by saying that he was a small man in certain respects? I certainly do not exaggerate when I say that he was notorious for striking terror into the hearts of many of his direct and indirect subordinates. He could be merciless. Even relatively trivial issues could cause dreadful outbursts of anger. It is mainly this merciless side of him that I have in mind when I speak about being a little man. A thoroughly

great and just person does not treat his fellow human beings like that. And I want to pause there before I go into the greatest tragedy of MW's life because I read that part and I really thought about this because I told you before it's like very negative inner monologue and I want to reason one of the reasons I work by myself is I don't want to express like I don't want to talk to other people the way I talk to myself okay, and if you were at the reason I thought about this because like If you would ask Charlie Munger and I did I got to talk to Charlie Munger about this before he died

like who he thought the greatest entrepreneur of all time was and he would say Rockefeller and One of the most fascinating things about rock for us. Obviously the people you and I study together. You know, a lot of them are you know Ruthless and there's a bunch of examples of them being incredibly harsh and mean to people around them. But then on the, that's on one end of the spectrum, but I've said before, that's not a prerequisite to success. You have literally the guy that Munger says is the best ever do it and people worked for him for decades. They said they never heard him raise his voice. They never heard him say an unkind word. Now, of course, I'm not naive. Like Rockefeller's

competitors would not describe him as a nice person with etiquette and manners. But as they get older and I'm exposed to other people that are wildly successful and also not assholes. I think etiquette and manners, they become more important and admirable to me and maybe because I see that's like an area in my own life where I have like vast room for improvement and so it's almost like aspirational. But I don't, yeah, I don't want to get to the end of my life and be described by people like that that say like, he was a small person, a little man. So yeah, I, you know, I want to rip through these ideas in a fast manner. I want to be respectful of your time. But I do think pausing there is really important. You know, just what, how do we want to be described after we're gone?

And then I'm not going to say it's the cause for what happens next, which is by far the greatest tragedy in MW's life, but it is interesting that it follows in the book like this. So Mark Jr., which is MW's grown son, this is towards the end of MW's life. He's probably 70 years old when this occurs. Mark Jr. is obviously being, he's running parts of the company the family business he's being trained he is and w successor. And he makes a mistake and says mark junior had been given a interview. And he was asked like why did the wallenberg start building this new pulp factory in germany without yet having received permission from the authorities and he had answered honestly but imprudently that it was preferable to be prosecuted for breaking environmental laws into paying large damages for breach of

contract to a German buyer of pulp and so his reply aroused a great deal of attention and was reported throughout the press. He could expect to receive some sharp comments from MW. Sure enough, at the board meeting that afternoon, he was severely reprimanded by his father. His father then closes the meeting. MW then leaves Sweden to fly to London. The next morning wakes up, gets an alarming report that Mark Jr. had not appeared at his scheduled Friday morning meetings, nor did he spend the night at his house. So MW flies back to Sweden.

When he gets back in Stockholm, he is met by somebody that works with them and tells and that person tells MW the dreadful news that his son killed himself. MW's son went into the forest that afternoon and shot himself. And the book describes the days after this happens. I don't, I don't have words for this. Says MW did not outwardly reveal any sorrow or possible remorse. He told one family member, remember that in a crisis, we Wallenbergs are ice cold. There's another interview in the book given.

It says, I remember I was standing talking with MW at Mark Jr's funeral. MW looked at his watch and said, at 3 p.m. there's a board meeting at the bank. Only now do I understand the importance of these words. You have to force yourself to carry on and to return to normal life again. And then one of the saddest lines in the book is about Mark's son Husky, who is MW's grandson,

and it says, MW took care of Husky. The ties between them reflected the fact that it was a father who had lost his son and a son who had lost his father. And so for the remaining 10 to 12 years of MW's life he's spending the time trying to train the generation and the next generation after him for this perpetuation of this family dynasty. I think this is a fitting way to close on MW's life. He passes away when he's 82. It says a straightforward and simple theme rammed throughout MW's life. He passes away when he's 82, says a straightforward and simple theme ram throughout MW's life. He had accepted responsibility early on for taking over the family's heritage

and traditions from his parents. With almost religious fervor, his father preached to him about the importance of fulfilling this duty. In spite of crises, conflicts, and shifting political winds, MW carried out his task with remarkable consistency and strength. MW's whole life was colored by this overwhelming task. Anything else would have been a betrayal of his destiny. And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. Highly recommend buying the book.

If you buy the book using the link in the show notes below, available on your podcast player and at founderspodcast.com. You'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. Last time I checked, there's only one or two copies available, but if you can get a copy of it, highly recommend you buy the book. That is 377 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.