It’s hard to have guessed that Santander’s Ana Botín, a trailblazer in global finance, was considering being a journalist or a spy before becoming a banker. Or that UBS’s boomerang CEO, Sergio Ermotti, was once a talented soccer player, while Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary hated accountancy.
Those are just some of the candid tidbits the world’s most important leaders divulge in their interviews with the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund’s chief, Nicolai Tangen, on his podcast, In Good Company.
His roster of distinguished guests includes the CEOs of companies that the $1.6 trillion sovereign fund owns or invests in. Norges Bank Investment Management, as it’s formally known, manages Norway’s massive oil and gas revenues. In 2023, the fund made $213 billion in profits.
Its tentacles reach some of the world’s largest companies, from Apple to LVMH and Nestlé, totaling nearly 9,000 companies worldwide. With that influence comes direct access to engage with the world’s top leaders.
Tangen’s aim with his prominent guests is to have them serve “a bit of their secret sauce” to listeners, he said in a video introducing the podcast.
“We aim to be the most transparent fund in the world,” Tangen told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. “I thought, you know, we own all these companies, we own big stakes, we actually have access to these CEOs.”
Indeed, the guest list includes illustrious executives from various industries—and notably some who rarely offer public interviews, let alone one-off podcast episodes.
Take this week’s guest, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Musk weighed in on the rapid pace of artificial intelligence breakthroughs, his hurdles with building xAI, and the prospect of colonizing Mars in conversation with Tangen.
The Norges Bank head launched the podcast in 2022, with former BP chief Bernard Looney as his first guest.
At the start of each episode, Tangen opens with a line on the stake—often worth billions of dollars—that the sovereign wealth fund holds in the company whose CEO he’s interviewing.
When chatting with the different chiefs, Tangen asks a mix of hard-hitting and insightful questions.
In one of the early episodes, Tangen asked Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon if being a DJ helped him be a better leader. Shortly after, he also probed Solomon on whether he thinks being CEO and chair of the bank’s board is the right structure.
In a separate episode, Tangen asked Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, whom he described as “one of the funniest people” he’s ever met, whether offering rock-bottom fares is good for the environment.
Even though the oil fund’s podcast features celebrated (and sometimes controversial) leaders on its invitee list, it still remains far from well-known. It has about 3 million downloads in total, the Norwegian fund told the Journal.
Still, the podcast is an important undertaking for Norges Bank, with a team (sometimes including portfolio managers) tasked with preparing for interviews. And perhaps bringing in corporate juggernauts to answer candid questions is a win in itself.