The Spotify co-founder whose fortune Bloomberg pegs at more than $11 billion said recently he would leave Sweden immediately if lawmakers introduce a wealth tax.
“Yes, absolutely,” Martin Lorentzon told the news service, adding that he would prefer to stay.
Lorentzon’s warning came days before Sweden’s general election on 13 September, the vote that could hand tax policy to parties pushing exactly the levy he dreads.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has spent months promising the opposite, offering tax cuts, free kindergarten places and an economy that outpaces its neighbours.
Kristersson leads the Tidö coalition, a minority alliance of Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals. Sweden Democrats supply votes from outside government. The four parties took office four years ago on promises to curb migration and gang crime. Homicides fell to 84 last year from 124 in 2020, and asylum applications dropped 30% to their lowest level since 1985.
In July, the coalition also enacted a law letting authorities revoke residence permits over repeated misconduct, a measure that drew objections from rights groups.
Even so, 52 children under 15 appeared in court for murder or attempted murder last year, a toll that complicates any claim of a settled society.
Kristersson now wants the campaign fought on different ground.
Growth As The Pitch
Sweden’s statistics office lifted its 2026 gross domestic product forecast to 2.5% in late August, over double the roughly 1.1% projected across the European Union. Inflation has slipped below 1%.
On paper, the combination, paired with tax relief and free childcare, should carry an incumbent to a second term. Polling tells another account.
The Social Democrat-led opposition holds a lead of several points over the governing bloc, and several surveys put the Red-Green camp above 50% support.
Voters appear to weigh the price of gang crime and migration policy more heavily than the growth case Kristersson showcases.
Sweden’s War Footing
Growth optimism sits alongside Sweden’s rearmament drive. Sweden joined NATO in 2024. Its military has since widened its presence across the Baltic and the Arctic, where melting ice and mineral deposits have drawn renewed attention from Stockholm’s defence planners.
In spring, the armed forces ran Aurora 26, the largest exercise since the 1990s, involving 18,000 troops from 13 countries. Military chaplains and morticians rehearsed handling war dead, the drill unseen since the early 1950s.
The Church of Sweden, the country’s statutory burial authority, still plans capacity equal to 5% of the population, near 500,000 people, the Cold War benchmark now revived after decades dormant.
Preparing for war, enforcing tighter migration rules and cutting taxes all draw on the country’s treasury. And its government funding every promise might need the private wealth Lorentzon embodies.
This revenue must keep flowing through ordinary income and corporate levies, not a wealth tax which Swedish history treats with suspicion.
The Tax Fight Unsettled
Sweden scrapped its wealth tax in 2007, after the levy raised barely 0.16% of gross domestic product. Such a modest yield struck lawmakers at the time as too small to justify the political and administrative price of collecting it.
Even the Social Democrats who once defended the tax now cite its record as reason enough to leave it retired.
Magdalena Andersson, the Social Democrat leader positioned to become prime minister if the opposition wins, has ruled out reviving wealth, inheritance or gift taxes.
Her likely coalition partners see it differently. The Left Party campaigns for a levy on billionaires, and the Greens propose a separate charge on the richest Swedes.
Norway’s experience next door lends Lorentzon’s threat credibility which campaign rhetoric usually lacks. Hundreds of wealthy residents relocated south after Oslo raised its own wealth tax.
What Sunday Decides
Kristersson’s growth premise assumes voters reward stability over grievance, with entrepreneurs like Lorentzon and Daniel Ek staying put regardless of who governs after 13 September.
Each assumption looks shaky. Should the opposition prevail, Andersson would still need to keep her own allies in check on tax, a task she has attempted before without lasting effect. Kristersson’s coalition, if it survives, would inherit a defence budget still climbing, with a duty to prepare its population for conflict.
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