Wallenberg family

"Thoughts of a dynasty began to take shape. One of the few people Ruben admired and looked up to was Marcus Wallenberg, and when he saw how the Wallenberg family operated, he wanted his own family to be the same. A dynasty where one generation took over from the next. And the family was held together by a superior common interest."

"At the same time, Ruben realized that the group would have problems acquiring the necessary capital to finance further development. In his quest for money, he got the idea to let the Wallenberg family buy into Tetra Pak. The same year the company was named Tetra Pak, he thus offered the Wallenberg family to buy half of the shares for one million kronor. Jakob and Marcus Wallenberg thought that Alfa Laval could be a natural collaborative partner and had its CEO, Harry Faulkner, and the board take a closer look at the matter. But when they were done reviewing Tetra Pak, Faulkner informed Ruben that they considered the deal too risky and therefore declined the purchase."

"Carl Ramström’s insight into the danger of relying too much on the “good” results shown during high inflation rates was quite unique in the business world. It can be mentioned that not even the Wallenberg family had fully understood the connections. The district court judge himself, Marcus Wallenberg Senior, had understood it, but couldn’t withstand the rest of the family who insisted on higher dividends when the figures had been driven up by inflation. They had not understood that the “fine” figures really just constituted a big house of cards. The high dividends within the companies of Enskilda Bank were close to leading to the companies going under and the Wallenbergs nearly lost their role as Sweden’s leading financial family."

"The situation was grim and it seemed that the only thing that could save Tetra Pak was to borrow more capital. It was Ruben who in March 1971 was tasked with going to Stockholm and talking to his friends in the Wallenberg family to try to get new credits from Enskilda Banken. But once in Stockholm, he was immediately disappointed. His old friend Marcus did not even receive him. He believed that as chairman of the board, he should not interfere in the daily management of the bank. Ruben had to settle for “just” meeting the bank’s CEO, Marcus’s oldest son, Marc. Ruben took it as a personal insult that he did not get to meet the head of the finance family. It was as if they treated him like just any zero and not the great industrialist Ruben Rausing. He was no less offended that Marc refused to lend him the ten million kronor that the company needed."

"Ruben Rausing had the Wallenberg family as his role model in building his dynasty."

"The Wallenberg family has long lived by the principle “to act, but not to be seen"

"Additionally, a reasonably large institutional owner appeared in Boliden, Carlsons funds with the stock guru Björn Carlson. He argued that our purchase offer should have also included their Boliden shares. The argument was that Carlsons funds had been part of the placement solution when the Wallenberg family bought the Boliden shares from Volvo."

"It was far from what I admired about the Wallenberg family, the patient building and careful selection of associates. Stripped of inflated accounting and rubbish in the companies, the price should have been significantly lower. We had to work hard to clean up and sell off at the best prices we could get. But it didn't go better than that my capital base dropped significantly at a time when a large one would have been crucial for a successful business build."

"There are many meetings now. Stefan Persson has taken the time to commute between several boardrooms outside of H&M for a couple of years. He cannot say no when the Wallenberg family calls and gives him a seat on the board of the appliance company Electrolux, where Jacob Wallenberg, among others, sits. Wallenberg has been a leading industrial family for a long time, and there is a lot to learn from that experience. The family controls a dozen Swedish large corporations the size of H&M, such as Ericsson, Electrolux, and Saab, but without serving as CEOs. Typically, they govern as board members instead."