It's hard to imagine that Santander's Ana Botín, a pioneer in global finance, considered becoming a journalist or a spy before becoming a banker. Or that UBS Boomerang CEO Sergio Ermotti was once a talented soccer player, while Ryanair's Michael O'Leary hated accounting.
These are just some of the candid details some of the world's most important leaders revealed in an interview with Norwegian sovereign wealth fund chief Nicolai Tangen on the podcast “In Good Company.”
His roster of distinguished guests includes CEOs of companies owned or invested in by $1.6 trillion in government funds. Norges Bank Investment Management, as it is formally known, manages Norway's huge oil and gas revenues. In 2023, the fund made $213 billion in profits.
Its tentacles reach into some of the world's largest companies, from Apple to LVMH to Nestlé, totaling nearly 9,000 companies worldwide. Their influence gives them direct access to the world's top leaders.
Tangen's goal with his high-profile guests is to give listeners “a little bit of the secret sauce,” he said in a video introducing the podcast.
“We aim to be the most transparent fund in the world,” Tangen said. wall street journal In an interview. “I thought, we own all these companies, we own a lot of stock, and we actually have access to these CEOs.”
In fact, the guest list includes prominent executives from a variety of industries, especially some who rarely give public interviews, let alone one-off podcast episodes.
This week's guest is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. In his conversation with Tangen, Musk offered his thoughts on the rapid pace of advances in artificial intelligence, the hurdles in building xAI, and the prospects of colonizing Mars.
The Norges Bank boss launched a podcast in 2022 with former BP boss Bernard Looney as his first guest.
At the beginning of each episode, Tangen opens with a line about the stakes (often worth billions of dollars) held by sovereign wealth funds in the companies of the CEOs he's interviewing.
When speaking with various chiefs, Tangen asks a mix of tough and insightful questions.
In one of the early episodes, Tangen asked Goldman Sachs' David Solomon how being a DJ helped him become a better leader. Shortly afterward, he also asked Solomon whether he thought being CEO and chairman of the bank's board was the right structure.
In another episode, Mr Tangen asked Ryanair's Michael O'Leary, whom he described as “one of the funniest people” he had ever met, whether offering the lowest fares was good for the environment.
The Oil Fund's podcast is still relatively unknown, even though it has praised the (sometimes controversial) leaders on its guest list. The Norwegian foundation says it has had about 3 million downloads in total. journal.
Still, the podcast is an important initiative at Norges Bank, and the team (including, in some cases, portfolio managers) is responsible for preparing the interviews. And perhaps bringing in a big company to answer honest questions is a victory in itself.
