Meet The Real Trillion-Dollar-Man: His Name Is Nicolai Tangen, Not Elon Musk

Despite being once named the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk cannot hold a candle to Nicolai Tangen, a Norwegian executive whose net worth is more than $1.7 billion but who manages the $1.5 trillion-Norwegian sovereign wealth fund (SWF), Peter Conradi reported for The Sunday Times of London.

Photo Insert: Tangen, who manages Norway's sovereign wealth fund, is so different from Musk in that he once called for a 100% inheritance tax. He would walk back on it after the government asked him to take it easy.

A stickler for transparency, the Norwegian SWF has a 24-hour monitoring service that tracks the value of Tangen’s placements in more than 9,000 companies, hedge funds, agricultural projects, and extractive industries.

All told, Tangen’s investments cover 1.6% of the world’s corporations. To lead the SWF for 5 years and avoid a conflict of interest, Tangen had to divest his 43% share in AKO hedge fund, which handles assets worth $25 billion.

Norway built its SWF from oil revenues, which the Oslo government used to practically eliminate poverty in a country of 5.6 million.

While oil and gas liftings of Norway and the United Kingdom from the North are practically equal, Norway didn’t splurge in covering UK’s budget deficits and boosting consumer spending but invested 40% of the earnings in profitable Norwegian and foreign companies.

Part of the SWF cash goes to public projects and investments are covered by strict rules, its own environmental and corporate government principles, which Musk despises, that bars lodging cash in destructive projects and nuclear weapons.

Tangen is so different from Musk in that he once called for a 100% inheritance tax. He would walk back on it after the government asked him to take it easy. Taxing him 39% on an annual income of $68 million would be enough, the taxman said.

“To lose more than £140,000 or even £140 million in six months may be regarded as a misfortune; to be down £140 billion looks like carelessness.

But Nicolai Tangen, the head of Norway’s oil fund, seems remarkably unfazed — perhaps because there is still £1 trillion or so left in the kitty of the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund,” Conradi reported.

“I thought when I applied for the job that after having gone up for 24 years there was a possibility that the fund could decline in value,” he says, seated in its office in Mayfair, London, before adding with a laugh: “But I’m the biggest loser ever. I lost 1,680 billion Norwegian kroner (£140 billion), in the first half of the year. Nobody since the birth has lost that much.”

But with oil prices on the rebound, the loss was eventually overcome, unlike Musk, who is obsessed with occupying Mars.

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