Five years ago, every single leader and head of office was Norwegian. Today 40% of our leadership group and all our heads of offices come from outside Norway. Different backgrounds, different networks, different ways of seeing the world. That’s how you build a better fund.
— Nicolai Tangen (@NicolaiTang1) April 13, 2026
Nicolai Tangen posted a tweet in which he boasts that 40 per cent of the staff in the Oil Fund (Oljefondet) come from abroad. He then received a severe rebuke from followers on X.
Bragging about firing Norwegians to hire foreigners is strange.
— Alexander E. Minge 🇳🇴 (@Alexander4840) April 13, 2026
Several raise pertinent questions.
“That’s how you build a fund that doesn’t work in the Norwegian peoples best interest”
— Paul Clarke🤰🏼🌲🇳🇴 (@PaulClarkebtc) April 13, 2026
This is the most sensitive political question: Do Tangen, Stoltenberg and Støre have an agenda that differs from having the interests of the Norwegian people in view?
Such a high proportion of foreigners as 40 per cent bears a suspicious resemblance to DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Democrats’ ideological slogan which many large companies followed, but which they have now abandoned. It became too costly. But Tangen can surely afford it.
The question is whether the Norwegian people are well served by having a head of the Oil Fund who pursues his own course.
The next question is who the Oil Fund belongs to. Perhaps it is not the people? Perhaps we are witnessing the beginning of the same as with hydropower (fossekraft), which is 100 per cent climate-clean, but which is now exported abroad and imported at exorbitant prices. Norwegians have been fobbed off with “Norgespris”, which obscures the larger question:
Do the country’s riches no longer belong to the population?
Is the country’s wealth to be used for “higher purposes” determined by those at the top, and defined by those who possess insight and understanding?
In that case, we are back in forms of governance that have nothing to do with social democracy.
Støre, Stoltenberg, and Tangen then become akin to princes in a new aristocracy.
You call this progress? I see a quiet transfer of control away from the people it’s supposed to serve. Weakening national control in favor of outside influence is a failure of responsibility. Hardly something to celebrate.
— the Philosopher (@Mtrygge) April 13, 2026