Thor Björgólfur's story is fascinating in one way because it gives us a great insight into Iceland’s catastrophic banking collapse in 2008, but there are also so many other great stories in Thor's own business career—like the 10 years he spent building his first business in Russia, some very big question marks about Thor’s dealings while he was there, how he sold his Russian brewery to Heineken and made $100 million, went back to Iceland to rehabilitate his family name, became Iceland's first billionaire, and how it all came crashing down and he became a pariah in his country.
And for the rest of this story, I'm going to refer to him as simply Thor because—well, come on—it’s Thor, and he actually kind of looks like Thor.
A Family Name to Restore
Thor was born in Reykjavík in 1967. And he was born into a very prominent family.
On his mother's side, his great-grandfather went bankrupt twice, came back both times, and went on to build a huge fishing and shipping business. One of his uncles had served as prime minister.
Thor's father came from a much more modest working-class background. But by 1977, he had worked his way up to become CEO of Iceland's second-largest shipping company.
Thor was a very confident young fellow. Entrepreneurial from a young age—while at high school, he organised the first Oktoberfest beer festival in Iceland.
But in 1985, the shipping company that his father ran went bust. And the fallout caused a national scandal and ultimately resulted in his father being found guilty on five counts of minor bookkeeping offences, and he got a suspended prison sentence.
This had a huge impact on Thor—he’s admitted himself that much of what drove him over the years that followed was a determination to restore his family's name.
He would later tell Forbes magazine, “Respect is the number one thing that occupies my mind. Power, money, that's just the road to respect.”
Thor left Iceland to study finance at New York University. He loved New York, and ever the entrepreneur, while studying he organised nightclub events. His plan was to stay in America and get a job on Wall Street, but when he graduated in 1991, the US had just come through a recession, banks were cutting jobs and there weren't many opportunities.
So he returned to Iceland, working for his father, who by this stage was running a soft drinks company.
Ten Years in Russia
Now, the company had some bottling equipment it no longer needed, so his father sold it to an Icelandic businessman who was setting up a new drinks operation in St. Petersburg in Russia. And this guy agreed to hire Thor as marketing director, so Thor moved to St. Petersburg.
He obviously impressed the owners because within a year Thor had taken over as managing director. And he decided to pivot from soft drinks to alcopops, which were taking off big time in other markets like the UK.
This turned out to be a big success, although as the company was kept private, I don’t have any sales figures.
But Thor’s success in this business has been clouded in a big dollop of shadiness.
Because in 1995, Thor and his father took control of the company, claiming they had bought a majority of the business from the original owners for $500,000, despite the business being valued at around $15 million.
The original owners accused them of falsifying the documents. It became a very messy legal dispute, with armed guards preventing the original owners from entering the premises.
Now, I really dug into this, and it was very complicated and confusing, but basically, while the courts didn't establish that the signatures had been forged, they did rule that the agreements used to transfer ownership were invalid.
But when the original owners were eventually able to gain entry to the factory, it was empty. Thor and his father had moved the business and its equipment to a different location, so the original owners never recovered their business.
And this case has followed Thor around like a bad smell ever since, and I think rightly so—it all sounds very shady and the type of thing that you could get away with in Russia in the 90s and early 2000s.
It was a pretty lawless and Wild West place to be doing business. For example, at least 79 bankers and more than 150 businessmen were assassinated between 1994 and 1997, while The Guardian described the brewing industry in St. Petersburg, where Thor was operating, as mafia-infested.
I listened to a podcast where Thor compared working in Russia to walking by a river filled with crocodiles—you had to be very careful, don't be flashy, don't attract much attention.
And according to Thor, there were times when men in leather jackets would turn up at his office unannounced, demanding a cut of the business or some sort of partnership.
Thor also mentioned how he had some good friends who helped him navigate through these situations. It definitely makes you wonder who these friends were because to survive in business in Russia, I’m guessing that you needed to form some unlikely alliances.
And this also gives us a very good insight into the type of risk and danger that Thor was willing to put up with, and it paid off.
In 1997, Thor sold the bottling plant to PepsiCo—the sale price was never publicly disclosed—and used the money, together with a $25 million investment from a US private equity group, to build a brewery and launch his own premium beer.
Thor brought in modern German brewing equipment and experienced European brewers, and even the bottles were designed to look like expensive imported beers.
So he really got the product and the marketing right. And the timing was perfect. You see, the Russian economy collapsed in 1998, and because the ruble was so weak, imported premium beers became much more expensive, so sales of Thor's beer grew very quickly.
And in 2002, Heineken bought his brewery for $400 million—Thor's cut was $100 million.
Now, you have to give a lot of credit to Thor here. He spent 10 years working in probably one of the most dangerous places in the world to do business, and he not only survived—he thrived.
But then again, thriving in Russia raises its own questions and suspicions, and rightly so, because while Thor got out with $100 million, there are some big question marks, especially over the whole business transfer debacle.
The Return to Iceland
As mentioned, Thor had brought US private equity investors into his brewing business, and as he interacted with them over the years while in Russia, he realised that he’d much prefer to be investing in companies rather than running them himself.
In fact, he'd already started investing in pharmaceuticals in the late 1990s, when he borrowed some money to buy into a Bulgarian pharmaceutical company—and stick a pin in that because this business became the foundation of Thor’s billions.
Thor had always wanted to go back to the USA, but by 2002 the business environment in Iceland had changed significantly.
So for a bit of context, Iceland's economy has traditionally been heavily dependent on its natural resources, particularly fishing and its huge supply of cheap electricity from hydroelectric and geothermal energy.
But back in the 1990s, the then Prime Minister Davíð Oddsson was a big admirer of the free-market policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
So he began selling off state-owned businesses, cut corporate tax from 48% to 18% and made Iceland a much more attractive place to do business.
And as part of this free-market push, he also decided to privatise the three main banks. And so Thor, with his newfound wealth, decided to get in on the act. Together with his father and another business partner, they bought 46% of Landsbanki, the second-largest bank, for $145 million.
And outside of the business opportunity, there was another reason why Thor wanted to invest in the bank.
In an interview I listened to, he openly admitted that he had a chip on his shoulder over the stigma attached to his family following his father's conviction back in the 1980s, and he wanted to prove a point.
And so by buying into the bank, and then installing his father as its chairman, Thor was attempting to rehabilitate the family name.
The Business Vikings
And once Iceland's three major banks were privatised in the early 2000s, things really started to take off, and by take off I mean they got completely out of hand.
The banks were borrowing billions from international financial markets and using that money to lend to businesses and ordinary Icelanders.
And Iceland was also attracting huge amounts of money from foreign investors, and this was because interest rates in Iceland were so high, sometimes as high as 15%. So an investor could borrow money in Japan at, say, 3% interest, and then use that money to buy Icelandic bonds, where they could earn 15%.
So as long as Iceland's currency, the krona, stayed strong, there was a lot of money to be made.
And ordinary Icelanders were getting in on this as well, borrowing money through their own banks in foreign currencies like the Japanese yen, where interest rates were much lower, and using it to buy houses, cars and other things.
But of course, if the krona collapsed, the amount they owed in their own currency would shoot up.
And with all this money pouring into the country, Iceland went through this enormous economic boom.
The numbers are mind-boggling. Between 2003 and 2007, the Icelandic stock market increased ninefold.
Property prices in Reykjavík tripled.
And by 2006, the average Icelandic family's wealth was estimated to be three times what it had been just three years earlier.
And I love this stat: In 2007, more Range Rovers were sold in Iceland than in Sweden and Denmark combined, despite those two countries having a combined population more than 50 times larger than Iceland.
But look, I want to be clear, this is not a case of pointing and laughing at how Icelanders lost the run of themselves. I could pluck statistics from Ireland, the US and I’m sure other countries during the lead-up to 2008 that would show how overheated a lot of markets were.
Iceland wasn’t the only country that lost the run of itself, but because it was such a small country, and its banks had grown to a size the country could never realistically support, when the whole thing came crashing down, the consequences for Iceland were particularly severe.
And of course, it wasn't just ordinary Icelanders borrowing money.
You had this small group of extremely wealthy businessmen, with Thor leading the charge, who owned major stakes in Iceland's banks and were using them almost like their own personal piggy banks to finance the purchase of businesses all over Europe.
They became known as the Business Vikings, and they were snapping up some of Britain's best-known retailers, including House of Fraser, Hamleys and Debenhams, as well as investing in airlines, property, banks and food companies across Europe.
Thor's own father led the consortium that bought Premiership club West Ham United in 2006.
These Business Vikings were being hailed as this new wave of super-astute businessmen—but of course they weren’t. They were just using really cheap money that they had very easy access to, with very few checks and balances, to hoover up businesses at inflated prices that no one else was willing to pay.
Thor, who at this stage was living in London, was the most successful of the Business Vikings.
His two biggest investments were Actavis—a pharma company that produced generic drugs—which had grown out of the Bulgarian pharma business that I referenced earlier, and he was growing it rapidly through acquisitions. But of course, it was all very highly leveraged.
And his other big investment was Play, a Polish mobile phone operator.
By 2005, Thor had become Iceland’s first billionaire, worth $1.4 billion, and this was big news in Iceland.
It led the evening television news, dominated every front page and the people of Iceland took pride in it, which was definitely a change from the traditional Icelandic attitude, where people generally didn't flaunt their wealth or success.
Here’s a quote from an Icelandic businessman:
“That was a huge cultural change. In the old days, whenever anyone got too rich, they were brought back down to earth. But suddenly, everyone else decided to try to join the rich. Everyone believed the markets would take care of us. ‘This is a new era,’ we used to say. ‘It is Iceland’s time.’ We thought we would join the G20.”
Within two years, Thor’s net worth had jumped to $3.4 billion, helped by a massive €4.7 billion leveraged buyout of Actavis—his pharma investment. To pull it off, he personally borrowed €4 billion from Deutsche Bank.
2007 marked his 40th birthday, and Thor celebrated by flying 120 friends to Jamaica on a chartered Boeing 767. 50 Cent performed at the party.
And as Thor recounted: “On my 40th birthday I was sitting on top of the world.”
But in an interview from a few years ago, he said that his intuition was telling him that it had all gotten a bit crazy, and it was all too easy. But there was another part of him that was telling him to keep going, because these opportunities won’t be around forever.
When the Bubble Burst
And this is the thing, it’s easy to blame Thor for not recognising that he was in the middle of a bubble—but we were all in the middle of a bubble back then in Ireland, in Iceland, in the US, in lots of developed countries—and we knew it.
There had been warnings for years. Maybe that was the problem. The doomsayers had been continually predicting that the bubble would burst, but with every passing month when nothing happened, we continued to fool ourselves.
And I remember some people putting forward the ridiculous theory that we were in a new age where the traditional boom-and-bust cycles were a thing of the past. While the more supposedly cautious commentators and politicians were predicting a soft landing—as in yes, this will come to an end, but it will be well managed—it will be OK.
But the thing is, it’s called a bubble for a very good reason—because when it bursts, it’s a sudden, violent action.
And from August 2007 through to September 2008, the financial markets were getting increasingly nervous. Banks were becoming more reluctant to lend money.
And then, on 15 September 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed.
Banks everywhere stopped trusting one another, and literally overnight, interbank lending simply stopped. And as we all know, this had a catastrophic effect on the financial system worldwide, and none more so than in Iceland.
And for Thor, the problems weren't just confined to his Icelandic bank. Deutsche Bank was demanding that he put more money into his pharmaceutical business or risk having its loans called in.
So on 30 September 2008, while Iceland's banking system was falling apart, Landsbanki, the bank that Thor had a 46% share of, agreed to provide €153 million to help keep his pharma company afloat.
So here was a bank in the midst of the biggest financial crisis ever, struggling to find enough money to meet its own obligations, yet it was still providing enormous financial support to one of its biggest shareholders, to help protect his private business.
That stinks to high heaven, and I think it gives us a very good idea of what went wrong with Iceland’s banking system in the years leading up to the crash.
And then, on Friday 3 October, Iceland's president telephones Thor in London and tells him to come home. The banking system is close to collapse.
And over the next few days, Thor’s involved in emergency meetings with government ministers and bank executives, trying to find some way of keeping the banks alive.
But there’s no way out of this. The banks were drowning in debt, nobody was willing to lend them any more money, and the government couldn't possibly cover what they owed because the three banks had grown to nine times the size of the country's economy.
So the government couldn’t possibly prop them up, and as a result, between 7 and 9 October, the three banks collapsed.
A Country in Crisis
And the consequences for ordinary Icelanders were devastating.
The currency, the krona, collapsed, inflation soared, and many people saw the amount they owed on their mortgages and loans more than double.
And then you had thousands of people losing their jobs, particularly in construction, retail and financial services, while others saw their investments and pension savings lose a huge amount of their value.
So the scale of the disaster, relative to the size of Iceland, was extraordinary.
Now, I've read plenty of articles praising Iceland for letting its banks fail. But look, it wasn't really a choice. While other countries were rescuing banks considered too big to fail, Iceland's banks were simply too big to save.
The government simply didn't have the money to rescue the banks or repay their enormous debts—remember, the banks had grown to nine times the size of the economy.
But what it did do was protect ordinary Icelanders' bank deposits by setting up new banks so people could still access their money and businesses could continue operating.
And rather than leaving Icelandic taxpayers responsible for all the money the banks owed, the losses were left with the banks' creditors.
Now, this did initially damage Iceland's reputation with international investors.
But by 2011, just three years later, Iceland was borrowing on international markets again.
And, forgive me for getting a bit local here, but I am from Ireland, and I can’t help but think that what happened in Iceland raises serious questions about the decision of the Irish government back in 2008 to guarantee not just ordinary people's savings, but the enormous debts owed to the banks' major creditors, leaving Irish taxpayers to pick up a huge part of the bill when the banks collapsed.
From Billionaire to Public Enemy Number One
Anyway, I digress. Back to Thor. He could rightly argue that at least numerically he lost more than anyone else. The following is from an article in the UK Times:
“Nobody has lost money faster than Thor Bjorgolfsson. When he went to bed on Friday, October 3, 2008, he was worth £3bn. By Monday night in his own words, “everything was gone.”
But as you can imagine, the Icelandic public had very little sympathy for Thor. They’re enraged, there are protests outside parliament, and they want answers about how the banks were run.
And as the poster boy for Iceland’s success, as well as one of the major shareholders in one of the defunct banks, Thor became one of the lightning rods for this anger.
His home was graffitied, and a brick was thrown through the window of his house one night while he was there with his wife and kids.
Thor later says, “I was treated like a pariah, as a man who supposedly brought down an entire economy. I felt so bad about everything. It was overwhelming, all pervasive. I felt like I was being sucked into a black hole.”
And look, of course Thor wasn’t solely responsible for the crash, but he does bear some responsibility, as was highlighted in the official investigation into the banking crash.
The report was extremely critical of the close relationships between the banks and the businessmen like Thor who owned them.
In particular, it found that Thor and his father were the bank's biggest borrowers, owing more money than the bank's entire shareholder equity.
And the investigators found that they had enjoyed unusually easy access to loans, with the bank bending the rules designed to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Thor disputed parts of the report. But two days after it was released, he published a full-page apology in an Icelandic newspaper.
He wrote, “I request forgiveness from all Icelanders for my role in the banking collapse... I request your forgiveness for my complacency towards the danger signs which arose. I request forgiveness for having not succeeded in following my instincts when I realised the danger. I request your forgiveness”
Now, I know when this was published, he came in for a huge amount of criticism. Many thought it was self-serving, a lot of people were sceptical as to its sincerity.
The truth of the matter is that only Thor can say for certain if this was a sincere apology.
But to me, the way that it’s worded definitely makes me think that this wasn’t concocted by your typical PR or damage control consultant. It feels like a very personal apology, it feels very vulnerable.
But who knows, and maybe he was naive to think that the Icelandic people were ready to forgive him. But regardless, I think Thor deserves some credit because at the very least he’s publicly taking responsibility for his role in the collapse.
Also, and crucially, it should be noted that Thor himself wasn't charged with any crime, while plenty of others were.
Because Iceland was one of the few countries that actually jailed senior bankers and some of the powerful businessmen involved in the banking boom.
More than 30 people were convicted, including the chief executive of Thor's own bank, with some receiving prison sentences of five years or more.
Now, there were plenty of people in Iceland who felt that some of the wrong people had been prosecuted, or that others had escaped punishment altogether.
And I’m sure there are plenty who feel that Thor got off lightly, but the fact of the matter is that there was nothing to pin on him—borrowing hundreds of millions isn't a crime.
Clawing His Way Back
In relation to his own losses, when the crash happened, Thor's companies owed around $10 billion, of which he had personally guaranteed almost $1 billion.
But the severity of the financial crisis actually worked in his favour. You see, his creditors didn't want to sell his investments into a panicking market for a fraction of what they might eventually be worth, so rather than forcing him into bankruptcy, they were prepared to work out a deal.
Thor hires a restructuring expert, and in July 2010 he reaches an agreement with his creditors.
He has to give up his house in Reykjavík, his holiday cottage, his private jet and Ferrari.
But I wouldn’t feel too bad for him—he does get to keep his £10 million London home, and crucially, he's allowed to keep his stakes in Actavis, Play and several other businesses, although any money he makes from them has to go towards paying off his debts.
Actavis is where the biggest opportunity appears.
Because in 2012, Thor helped arrange the sale of the company to an American pharmaceutical company for $5.6 billion, and while Thor didn’t get any cash from the sale, as most of the money went to paying off debts, he negotiated an agreement that gave him shares in the new company if it met certain performance targets.
And when those targets were met the following year, the shares Thor received were worth more than $700 million.
By July 2014, he's able to settle his remaining obligations, so six years after the banking collapse, he cleared his debts.
Then his Polish telecom investment, Play, became Europe's largest IPO in 2017, and in 2020, Thor sold his remaining stake in a deal that netted his investment firm around €800 million.
Over the years, he’s also made some very good investments in companies like Zwift, Deliveroo, Monzo and Stripe.
As of 2026, Forbes estimates Thor's wealth at around $1 billion, and he's still Iceland's richest man.
And fortunately, Thor isn't the only one who's bounced back. Iceland has recovered remarkably well, and today it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world, helped by huge growth in tourism, alongside its traditional strengths in fishing and cheap energy.
As for Thor, he now lives in Milan. He’s best friends with David Beckham and film director Guy Ritchie, and the three have been on fishing trips together in Iceland.
And I have to give him kudos for his resilience. Like, this guy is tough and smart—you can’t do 10 years in Russia and come out with $100 million without having a lot of street smarts and, let's say, resourcefulness.
Then losing your fortune, becoming public enemy number one and having the tenacity and resilience to keep fighting and claw your way back—that’s not easy.
The Price of Respect
But what about respect?
Because remember, for Thor, respect is everything. He said so himself—“Respect is the number one thing that occupies my mind.”
And yet, because of his involvement in Iceland's banking collapse, but for me I think more so because of the shadiness, the big question marks that surround the business takeover or transfer in Russia, he's ended up with serious questions hanging over his own reputation.
And that’s the great irony here—isn’t it?
Here's a man who spent so much of his life trying to restore his family's good name, only to end up with questions hanging over his own.
I think that’s why Thor’s story is such a fascinating one.