Bonnier

"The shivering Bonnier director is onto a theme that recurs in separate director and editor stories about Jan Stenbeck. First you think: Damn, that rich bastard goes on as if he owned me. Then you realize that in some sense he does."

"At the turn between the 1960s and 1970s, Asea, L.M. Ericsson, Volvo, Skånska Cementgjuteriet, and Rederi AB Nordstjernan were the five largest companies in Sweden. In Hermansson’s book, the fifteen original families were named Wallenberg, Söderberg, Wehtje, Johnson, Bonnier, Kempe, Klingspor, Jeansson, Dunker, Broström, Schwartz, Hammarskiöld, Jacobsson, Åselius, and Throne-Holst."

"It is said to have taken H&M ten years to achieve profits in Germany, but afterwards, the country was for a long time the clothing company’s largest market. It took about as long for the Bonnier-owned Dagens Industri to become a cash cow. Stenbeck built his media empire against the wind; for a long time, his project was seen as the expensive, pointless playground of a powerful man. Over the years, the playground became the backbone of the dynasty."

"It was not a given that I would start at the School of Economics. My academic inclination rather suggested that I would become a history teacher or something in that direction. But it was entirely my own decision, met with some snorts from the family. One reason was my growing interest in companies and stocks. In addition to my voracious appetite for history, during the last years of high school, the world of companies and company founders emerged. Out at Parkudden on Djurgården, where my grandparents lived, there were plenty of anecdotes about the neighborhood, the Wallenberg’s Täcka Udden, Torsten Kreuger's villa with a large motorboat moored at the dock, the Bonnier villas, and the Thielska Gallery. It was a concentrated piece of Swedish business history that I absorbed."