“Who among us hasn’t been to one of these rather boring work cocktail parties. Full of people who only talk about themselves. And at the end, when you come home, you realize that you don’t know anything about the person with whom you have been chatting all the time by your side”. It is surprising that this is one of the concerns of one of the most powerful managers in the world. But Nicolai Tangen is very interested in human psychology. He even took a course at the London School of Economics.
Tangen runs a fund that is bigger than most states on the planet: the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. It has investments in 9,000 companies, owns about 1.5% of world shares and has assets that are equivalent, for example, to Australia’s GDP: 1.15 trillion euros.
When he was appointed to the position in the middle of the pandemic, he confessed that “it was the job of his dreams” since he was responsible for the retirements of his country. When, at the end of the sixties, Norway, in a last attempt, managed to find oil by drilling in its waters, it was decided to allocate the future income from hydrocarbons to feed a sovereign wealth fund to redistribute wealth among citizens.
It can be said that the Norwegians’ savings are in their hands. Tangen came from a successful career as a hedge fund manager (AKO Capital), which made him a multimillionaire in a short time. But when he took the reins of the sovereign wealth fund, he had to part with his company and open a foundation, amid controversies over a possible conflict of interest. Today he cries out against the excessive salaries of senior managers.
His personal history is unusual. At the beginning of his training he received training in the Norwegian secret services in the Russian language. He tells that it was “the hardest thing” he had to do in his life. The experience marked him, because one of the peculiarities of Tangen is that he applies police techniques to investment. He himself says that he uses linguists who have experience in the police to decipher and interpret the messages of suicide notes. He finds this helps him better understand what the executives he meets are saying (and not saying). He also did not hesitate to meet the investigators who interrogated Anders Breivik, the far-right terrorist responsible for the massacre with 77 murders on the island of Utoya in 2011: he wanted to learn how to ask the right questions even with highly radicalized people. .
Passionate about sailing, Tangen also wanted to study how professional sailors deal with defeats due to changes in external circumstances, such as the wind or waves. He says his resilience serves as a model for bouncing back from investments that don’t go as expected.
Which is what happened last year. The Norwegian Sovereign Fund had the worst result in its history in 2022 and lost 152,000 million euros, more than double what was left in 2008, the year of the great financial crisis. Impassive, during the presentation of the results last week, in an unusual exercise in transparency, Tangen asked his investment manager live why they had lost so much money.
The fall in the stock markets shook the fund: equities registered losses of 14%, despite the good results registered by the oil companies present in its portfolio. Because, despite its commitment to sustainability, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund continues to invest in energy companies. With the aim, according to Tangen, of improving their environmental awareness. In this sense, its recent agreement with Iberdrola in renewables with an investment of 600 million euros stands out.
Passionate about art (he trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art, it is credited with having the largest collection of Nordic modern art), he sponsored an Edward Munch exhibition at the British Museum with his foundation. He also graduated in cooking from the prestigious Cordon Bleu: his star dish is grilled turbot.
