Do we like them?

Do we like Ingvar Kamprad?

Our score: 6 out of 10. A frugal, down-to-earth founder with a real stain from his youth, and no later campaigning against anyone found.

Ingvar Kamprad was born in 1926 on a farm in Småland, southern Sweden, and was selling matches, pencils and Christmas decorations as a kid. At 17 he launched IKEA, first as a mail-order outfit, adding furniture around 1950 and a first store in 1958. He stepped back as CEO in 1988 and left the chair of Inter IKEA Group in 2013, and died in 2018 at 91 with a fortune Bloomberg put above $57 billion.

Nothing new on him lately, since he died in 2018, so this is a look back at a finished life. The thing that still follows him around is the fascist chapter. In 1994 he sent a handwritten letter to IKEA's roughly 25,000 staff after the story broke, saying he attended meetings led by Swedish right-winger Per Engdahl from 1945 to 1948, and that this was a part of his life he “bitterly regret[s]”.

In 2011 author Elisabeth Åsbrink's book alleged it went further. According to NBC News, the book claimed he joined a Swedish Nazi party in 1943 at 17, that security police opened a file on him, and that he stayed in touch with Nazi sympathisers until at least 1950. IKEA's spokesman called his involvement Kamprad's “biggest mistake” and the revelations “old news”, pointing to his 1994 apology.

Here's the bit that gives pause: according to The Local, Kamprad told Åsbrink around 2010 that Engdahl was a great human being, and that he saw no contradiction in it. So the regret was real, but it wasn't a clean break in how he talked about the man. His defenders say it was youthful folly; critics say the admissions came late and only when forced.

On the harm check, I found no words or campaigning from Kamprad himself against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, public health or the planet. The searches were thin on his personal politics, and I can't tell you what he thought on those fronts. The case against him rests on the 1940s and the later praise of Engdahl, not on any modern hate, so it's an asterisk, not a fail.

The good stuff is mostly in how he lived. He told a Swiss broadcaster in 2006 “People say I am cheap and I don't mind if they do,” and said he drove an old car to set an example for staff. PBS reports he flew economy and built stores on cheap land to pass savings to customers. In 2011 IKEA announced a donation of more than $60 million to the UN refugee agency, though one Swedish journalist called the timing damage control.