Do we like them?

Do we like Björn Ulvaeus?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Clean on harm and mostly on the right side, but the record we could verify is thin and includes one clumsy joke he apologised for.

Björn Ulvaeus is half of ABBA's songwriting engine, and in 2006 Swedish tax authorities went after him over how his royalty income was handled. He fought it and, in October 2008, a Swedish court ruled in his favour. That's a long fight with the taxman that ended in a win, not a conviction.

His one proper public blunder was in April 2013, when he joked about the Boston marathon bombings on BBC breakfast TV. He apologised quickly. It's a stain, and a genuinely tasteless one, but one moment rather than a pattern.

On the harm check, the clearest recent thing is Trump. In August 2024 ABBA's label said the band wanted Trump's campaign to stop using their songs and videos at rallies. Ulvaeus told Swedish newswire TT by text that Universal would handle getting the material taken down.

With LGBTQ+ people, the record is warm. In 2011 he thanked the band's gay fans at a party hosted by QX magazine. In 2019 Out reported ABBA crediting gay fans for their return to music. That's gratitude from a bloke whose catalogue gay dance floors have loved for fifty years, and we found nothing from him against trans people or anyone else.

Nothing new turned up on him lately, at least nothing we could confirm. The 'scandal' and 'retirement' pages that popped up in searches came from spammy sites, so we've ignored them. We also couldn't open full articles to check his climate, anti-racism and women's-rights comments, so we've left them out rather than guess.

So the verdict: yes, we'd support him. A big, long career, a tax case he won, one apologised-for gag, and no trail of grievance or culture-war grifting that we could find. The caveat is how thin our verified file is, so treat the 7 as a cautious one.