Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson (born 19 March 1967 in Reykjavík, Iceland), known internationally as Thor Bjorgolfsson, is an Icelandic businessman and entrepreneur, and former chairman of the financial firm Straumur-Burðarás and chairman of investment firm Novator Partners. As of March 2017, he is the richest person in Iceland and 1,161st richest person in the world according to Forbes. His most valuable holding today through Novator Partners is a share in Polish telecom outfit Play and he has also invested in smaller startups such as the Zwift online platform for indoor cycling as well as the Icelandic MMOG company CCP Games
Björgólfur was the first Icelander to join Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest people in 2005; has been declared “Iceland’s first billionaire”; and was ranked as the 249th-richest person in the world by Forbes magazine in 2007—up from 350th the previous year—with a net worth of $3.5 billion. In 2007 the Sunday Times’ Sunday Times Rich List put his net worth at £2,000 million. However, following the financial crisis of 2007–2010, Björgólfur’s net worth had declined to $1 billion by March of 2009. He worked out a complex deal with his creditors to pay off his debts while holding on to his key investments and on March 20, 2017 Forbes estimated his net worth at $1.81 billion
Early and family life
Björgólfur Thor is heir to a long family legacy in Icelandic business and politics. His great-grandfather was the legendary Danish-born Icelandic entrepreneur Thor Jensen, who helped to introduce the term “big business” to the country in the early years of the twentieth century. The eighth of Thor’s eleven children was Margrét Þorbjörg Thors Hallgrímsson, whose daughter Þóra Hallgrímsson had Björgólfur Thor as her only child by her third husband Björgólfur Guðmundsson. Þóra Hallgrímsdóttir, Björgúlfs Thor mother, was married to George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi party. Björgólfur Thor has often emphasised this, for example by adapting for his company Novator the old logo of Eimskip, which Thor had originally designed for his company Kveldúlfur hf, and through his association with the biographical documentary Thor’s Saga by Ulla Boje Rasmussen, which draws parallels between Thor Jensen and Björgólfur Thor.
Björgólfur Thor grew up in the Reykjavík suburb of Vesturbær. A sketch of Björgólfur Thor’s early life is offered by Ármann Þorvaldsson:
- His rare self-confidence made him stand out. He was immensely physically strong and bench pressed over 450 pounds. He was an entrepreneur from early on, and by the age of 11 he was delivering newspapers in the early hours of the morning. A year later he was a delivery boy at the University of Iceland and, at 13, was running his own home video delivery service. While still in high school, he was running a nightclub in Reykjavík and organised the first Oktoberfest beer festival in Iceland. After high school, he studied business in New York. Fluent in several languages, and with an unusual ability to both blend in and stand out, he embodied Iceland’s internationalism.
Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson chose to go to the United States in 1986 when his father Björgólfur Guðmundsson’s bankrupt firm, Hafskip, was embroiled in a financial scandal; the scandal may have arisen from the efforts of Hafskip’s main competitor Eimskip and its allied political party, the Independence Party, to reduce competition, and the events probably had a considerable effect on the young Björgólfur Thor. At times he has presented his subsequent business activities as an effort to regain his and his father’s reputations and pay their opponents back. Graduating from the prestigious Commercial College of Iceland in 1987, he completed a B.S. in Marketing at the Leonard N Stern School of Business at New York University in 1991.
On returning to Iceland, Björgólfur Thor became an events manager at Reykjavík’s then two biggest clubs: Tunglið and Skuggabarinn. At this time he met and married the filmmaker Kristín Ólafsdóttir, with whom he has three children, the first of whom was born in 2005. They currently live in London, United Kingdom.
| Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson | |
|---|---|
| Born | 19 March 1967 Reykjavík, Iceland |
| Nationality | Icelandic |
| Occupation | Investor and Entrepreneur |
| Net worth | USD $1.81 Billion |
| Spouse(s) | Kristín Ólafsdóttir |
| Children | 3 |
| Website | http://www.btb.is, http://www.novator.co.uk, http://thorbjorgolfsson.com/home |
- Iceland’s sole billionaire Thor Bjorgolfsson owns stakes in such businesses as Polish telecom Play, which went public in 2017 and Chilean telecom WOM.
- Bjorgolfsson also has investments in cryptocurrencies and such startups as Zwift, BeamUp and Deliveroo.
- Bjorgolfsson made his first fortune in the wilds of Russia, cofounding Bravo brewery and creating the popular Botchkarov beer brand.
- He sold it to Heineken in 2002 and used the proceeds to go on a buying spree in his native Iceland and Eastern Europe.
- He lost nearly all of his fortune when Iceland nearly went bankrupt in 2008 and he had to find a way to pay off more than $1 billion in debt.
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