Olav Thon, Billionaire Norwegian Real Estate Tycoon, Dies at 101

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(Bloomberg) — Olav Thon, who started out as a fur trader and built a property empire that made him one of Norway’s richest people, has died at 101. 

Kjetil Nilsen, chief executive of Oslo-based Olav Thon Gruppen, announced Thon’s death on the company’s website. No cause was given. 

Thon was the founder and chairman of the eponymous company, one of Norway’s largest closely-held real estate enterprises. It owns about 90 shopping centers, 80 hotels and 500 commercial properties in Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands, according to his company’s website. 

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“Thon was a unique businessman who created industry and jobs in and outside of Norway, but he never forgot his roots in Hallingdal and the local Norwegian community,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store told the public broadcaster NRK. 

The Norwegian tycoon, who was often seen wearing a knitted red beanie, transferred his shares in the company to a new 25 billion-kroner (about $4.1 billion at the time) fund, known as the Olav Thon Foundation, in December 2013. 

The foundation’s stated missions are to “exercise stable and long-term ownership” of his company “in accordance with the business management principles adopted by Olav Thon,” and to award funds for the public benefit. Much of the money goes toward the prevention of musculoskeletal disorders and for “outstanding teaching” in math and sciences, according to the foundation’s website and company reports.

“It’s important for me that the future of the Olav Thon Group is safeguarded, so that the business provides secure jobs for all its employees and can also work both to promote the nonprofit purposes that I wish to support and for society in general,” Thon — who had no children — said at the time.

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Enterprising Youth

In 2021, Olav Thon Gruppen had operating income of 10.3 billion kroner (about $1.2 billion at the time) and employed around 2,390 full-time employees, according to its annual report. Through his taxes, Thon contributed such a large share of the annual revenue collected by his municipality, Hole, that a fund was set up to help the local government mitigate the impact of him ever leaving. 

Since 1990, when he became eligible for a state pension, Thon paid more than 900 million kroner in personal income tax, according to his 2009 biography, Olav Thon: Billionaire in a Parka, written by Hallgrim Berg. 

Dag Ellingsen, author of The Fox: Olav Thon and His Methods, described his subject as “an ambivalent figure” in a 2014 interview with the New York Times. “He’s built a picture of himself as a guy who gives away all his money and walks in the mountains to be healthy,” Ellingsen said. “But on the other hand, he’s been building malls all around Norway and Sweden, making people drive long distances to buy things.”

Thon drew attention in 2013 by endorsing the anti-tax, anti-immigration Progress Party, saying it would help reduce bureaucracy that’s bad for businesses. The populist party entered government for the first time that year as a minority partner, but quit in 2020 to protest the repatriation of a woman who’d joined Islamic State.

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Thon Hotels

Thon was born on June 29, 1923, on a farm in Hallingdal, Norway. He was the youngest of four sons of a well-off farmer who invested most of his money in the development of local hydroelectric energy projects, according to a 2009 story in the journal The Norseman.

Aged eight, Thon started his business career by ordering a supply of Christmas cards from a mail-order catalog and selling them to his neighbors. He won his first contract at age 16 to build a road near his house in the mountainous Skarvheimen region. At 18, he set up a fur shop in the Majorstuen neighborhood of Oslo to sell fox, squirrel and rabbit pelts.

After World War II came to an end, he studied English in London.

In 1950, Thon purchased a block of real estate on Karl Johan, Oslo’s premier street. After diversifying into restaurants and hotels, he established the Rainbow Hotels chain in 1989, later renamed Thon Hotels, and expanded to shopping malls in the 1990s.

According to the Daily Mail, Thon’s first wife, Inger-Johanne Thon, died in 2018 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. The next year, at 95, Olav married Sissel Berdal Haga, a onetime judge he’d known for 30 years, at a ceremony on the rooftop of his first hotel, Hotel Bristol, in Oslo. He is survived by his wife. 

A keen hiker and skier, Thon helped pay for more than 90 Norwegian Trekking Association huts and cabins. 

“I can’t take the money with me when I die, but I have made arrangements as to how I want the money to be distributed,” Thon said in a 2008 interview with Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv.

He told the New York Times in a 2014 profile that he “never missed” having children. “From early morning to late at night it’s such an interesting life, and I’m healthy and free, and that’s not so easy with a family,” he said.

—With assistance from Heidi Taksdal Skjeseth.

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