How Billionaires Became an Endangered Species in Norway
7th January 2025
In June 2023, I wrote about the exodus of entrepreneurs from Norway after Kjell Inge Røkke, a fishing magnate turned industrialist, announced his move to Lugano, Switzerland.
“My capital will continue working in Norway,” wrote Røkke, whose wealth was estimated at $5.1 billion.
Røkke’s departure was projected to cost the Norwegian government 175,000,000 kroner annually (roughly $16 million), and he was just one of dozens of billionaires and multimillionaires to leave Norway following passage of its wealth tax.
Critics had warned Norway’s wealth tax would “trigger capital flight and threaten job creation,” and that’s precisely what happened. Norwegian reporter Rupert Neate noted that more “super-rich people” left Norway in 2022 than “during the previous 13 years.”
A reasonable person might expect that this exodus of wealth would have prompted Norwegian lawmakers to reconsider their confiscatory tax policy, but that’s not what happened. Instead, Norwegian lawmakers decided to double down on efforts to soak the rich, passing a new law that taxed unrealized capital gains for individuals leaving the country. This so-called “exit tax” is triggered when a resident relocates from Norway. The rate is 37.84 percent and is calculated based on the unrealized gains in shares and securities. Anti-capitalists wrote approvingly of the law.
The U.S. has a similar ‘exit tax’ laid on people who renounce their citizenship, typically because they live and work abroad and are tired of paying U.S. taxes from which they get no benefit.