> Ingvar Kamprad "is said to fly economy and drive an old Volvo. This frugality may help to explain why he is the world's eighth-richest man - although the four decades he spent living in Switzerland to avoid Swedish taxes may also have something to do with it."
In the case of Kamprad, it is definitely merely marketing. He hates paying taxes, and used the same passion for optimizing furniture to optimize his company structure. IKEA is one of the most complicated legal tax-evasion structures around. It is believed that a few percent of the worldwide revenue - not profits! - are going straight into Ingvar's pockets, tax-free. That's quite a feat.
Part of the reason the IKEA structure is so complicated is that it's engineered in a way to keep the both the tax benefits that everyone else also has (see Apple, Google, etc), and also keep the company in strict private Kamprad family control. Public companies like Apple don't need that extra complexity and get away with your standard Dutch-Irish sandwich
True technically but he is in dark grays - only a handful "national treasure" Swedish companies can make the Swedish state sometimes, not exactly look the other way, but not look very HARD.
(This was a long time ago of course, nowadays, IKEA is not very Swedish at all. It's not very particular anything. It's only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-national.)
It's fairly well known that Warren Buffet still lives in the house he bought in the fifties before he got ultra wealthy, but I was watching a documentary a couple of weeks back where he was explaining that his choice of breakfast at the McDonald's drive-thru window is dictated by the market closing price the day before. That's hardcore... and a little eccentric probably.
In [1], Bill Gates recounts an anecdote about Buffett (with a picture): Remember the laugh we had when we traveled together to Hong Kong and decided to get lunch at McDonald’s? You offered to pay, dug into your pocket, and pulled out…coupons!
Living in the same house is a popular fact, but it might be a little dishonest. It's a big house, with a lot of space around it, and it's obviously been kept up to date with somebody who has money. It's not at all like the 50 year old house my grandparents have.
I'm not sure how dishonest it is, as I can't imagine he stays put in the house for PR value.
Beyond that, I wouldn't assume that he's had an incredibly out-of-the-ordinary level of work done on the house. It's time-consuming, disruptive and messy.
Adjusting for his budget, I can only imagine this would all be made worse if the upgrades include holodecks, teleporters and a subterranean command center.
It's not like was the only car he owned. I mean, one could say Jay Leno drives some very old cars, and someone not knowing he's a car enthusiast collector could think he's frugal.
At one point in his life he drove a Porsche[1]. In fairness, he did drive the Volvo nearly 20 years --before he was advised to replace it because it was "dangerous" as he put it.
This is a popular thing to say, but it's nonsense. People get rich by making money, not by saving on secondhand Volvos. This is true even when we're talking about your regular-grade rich folks, but it's even more obviously true when talking about the richest people in the world.
It's possible if the government plays around with the tax system too much while being composed of idiots who don't understand basic math or don't understand why tax rates over 100% are bad.
As an example, former Croatian prime minister Jadranka Kosor introduced a new tax according to which if your after-tax income was above a certain limit, you had to pay an additional 4% of that income as tax. Of course this resulted in >100% marginal tax rates.
I assume Sweden had a similar situation, where it wasn't actually a 102% tax rate, but a combination of multiple different taxes that resulted in an effective tax rate over 100%. The people who created those taxes either didn't care or were simply too stupid to notice the problem.
It wasn't that common, but it was a real phenomenon that personal income marginal taxes could exceed 100 %. The Social Democrats in Sweden got angry when Astrid Lindgren pointed it out, and it seems some Hacker News readers with a downvote button become angry in the same way when this is mentioned.
