The Billionaire Who Stole Salt Packets: How IKEA's Founder Became the World's Most Frugal Rich Man

In 2008, one of the richest men on the planet was spotted at a furniture industry conference in Sweden. He was eating lunch alone in the cafeteria. Nothing unusual about that — except he'd brought his own sandwich from home.

The man was Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, worth an estimated $31 billion at the time. He could have bought the cafeteria. He could have bought the entire conference center. Instead, he was eating a sandwich he'd made that morning, wrapped in cling film, because he didn't want to pay for lunch.

This wasn't a one-time thing. This was the man's entire life.

A Farm Boy Who Sold Matches

Kamprad was born in 1926 on a small farm called Elmtaryd, near the village of Agunnaryd in southern Sweden. The names matter — they'd later become the "E" and "A" in IKEA (Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd, Agunnaryd).

He started his first business at age five, buying matches in bulk from Stockholm and selling them individually to neighbors at a markup. By age seven, he'd expanded to selling fish, Christmas decorations, and pencils. By ten, he was cycling around the countryside delivering goods.

At seventeen, his father gave him a small cash reward for doing well in school despite his dyslexia. Kamprad used it to register a company. He called it IKEA. The year was 1943.

He started by selling pens, wallets, picture frames — whatever he could source cheaply and sell through mail-order catalogs. Furniture came later, almost by accident. A local manufacturer offered him a good deal on tables, and Kamprad realized that furniture had better margins than pencils.

By 1951, he'd dropped everything else. IKEA was a furniture company.

The Flat-Pack Revolution

The story of IKEA's flat-pack innovation is legendary, and it started with a problem. In 1956, an IKEA employee named Gillis Lundgren was trying to fit a table into his car to deliver it to a photo shoot. It wouldn't fit. So he unscrewed the legs.

Kamprad watched this happen and had what might be the most profitable realization in retail history: if you take the legs off the table, the box gets smaller. If the box gets smaller, you can fit more boxes on a truck. If you fit more boxes on a truck, shipping costs drop. If shipping costs drop, you can sell the table for less. If you sell it for less, more people buy it.

But here was the real insight — the part that made Kamprad a billionaire: if the customer screws the legs on themselves, you don't need to pay someone to assemble it. You've just eliminated an entire labor cost from the supply chain.

Flat-pack wasn't just a packaging innovation. It was a complete reimagining of who does the work in the furniture business. The customer became the last worker on the assembly line. And they did it for free.

Frugality as Corporate Religion

Kamprad didn't just practice frugality in his personal life. He embedded it into IKEA's DNA so deeply that it became inseparable from the company's identity.

IKEA's headquarters in Älmhult, Sweden, looks like a slightly nicer version of one of their stores. No marble lobbies. No executive dining rooms. Managers fly economy class. Everyone, including senior executives, is expected to use both sides of a piece of paper.

Kamprad himself wrote a manifesto in 1976 called "The Testament of a Furniture Dealer." It's nine chapters of corporate philosophy, and the recurring theme is waste. "Wasting resources is a mortal sin at IKEA," he wrote. "Expensive solutions to any kind of problem are usually the work of mediocrity."

He meant it literally. When IKEA designed new products, the price came first. Designers were given a target retail price — say, $5.99 for a bookshelf — and told to work backwards. Figure out how to make it for that price. If you can't, redesign it until you can.

This is the opposite of how most companies work. Most companies design a product, calculate the cost, add a margin, and set the price. IKEA starts with what the customer can afford and engineers everything else around that number.

The Personal Frugality That Became Legend

The corporate frugality was impressive. The personal frugality was something else entirely.

Kamprad drove a 1993 Volvo 240 well into the 2000s. When journalists asked why, he said it still worked fine. He flew economy class on every trip, even transatlantic flights. He took the bus when possible. He bought his clothes at flea markets.

He was known to pocket salt and pepper packets from restaurants. Not because he couldn't afford salt — because throwing away a perfectly good salt packet felt wrong to him. Hotel toiletries went into his suitcase. Free bread rolls at conferences went into his pockets.

At IKEA's restaurants — the ones inside the stores that serve those famous Swedish meatballs — Kamprad would eat during the last hour before closing, because that's when they discounted the food. The founder of the company, eating marked-down meatballs in his own store, because paying full price felt unnecessary.

He once told a Swedish newspaper that he'd waited until the afternoon to buy his Christmas tree, because that's when the prices dropped. This was a man whose net worth fluctuated by hundreds of millions of dollars daily based on currency movements. He was saving three dollars on a Christmas tree.

Was It Real or Was It Performance?

This is the question everyone asks, and the answer is: both.

Kamprad grew up poor in rural Sweden during the Depression. That kind of childhood leaves marks. The instinct to save, to never waste, to squeeze value from everything — that was genuine. People who knew him privately said he was exactly the same behind closed doors. There was no switch he flipped for the cameras.

But Kamprad was also a brilliant businessman, and he understood that his frugality was IKEA's most powerful marketing tool. Every story about the billionaire flying economy or eating discounted meatballs reinforced IKEA's brand promise: we don't waste money, so you don't have to spend money.

When the CEO of a luxury brand drives a Rolls-Royce, it signals that the brand is worth paying a premium for. When the founder of IKEA drives a twenty-year-old Volvo, it signals that this is a company that will never charge you a cent more than necessary.

The frugality was authentic. But Kamprad was smart enough to know it was also good business.

The Dark Chapter

No honest account of Kamprad can skip the uncomfortable part. In his youth, Kamprad was involved with Swedish fascist groups. He attended meetings of the New Swedish Movement, a pro-Nazi organization, in the 1940s. He maintained a friendship with Per Engdahl, a Swedish fascist leader, into the 1950s.

Kamprad called it "the greatest mistake of my life" in a 1994 letter to IKEA employees. He said he'd been influenced by his German grandmother, who admired Hitler, and that he deeply regretted it. Whether that explanation is sufficient is for each person to decide.

What's relevant to the frugality story is that Kamprad spent the rest of his life trying to be seen as a man of the people — democratic, egalitarian, anti-elitist. His extreme frugality may have been partly genuine personality, partly smart branding, and partly an attempt to distance himself from the aristocratic associations of his youthful politics.

The Tax Exile Twist

For all his talk about frugality and Swedish values, Kamprad left Sweden in 1973 to avoid taxes. He moved to Denmark, then to Switzerland, where he lived for over forty years. He structured IKEA through a complex web of Dutch foundations and Liechtenstein trusts that made it nearly impossible to determine who actually owned the company or how much tax it paid.

This is the contradiction at the heart of the Kamprad legend. He'd steal a salt packet to save two cents, then structure his business to avoid billions in taxes. He'd fly economy to save a few hundred dollars, then live in a country specifically chosen because it wouldn't tax his wealth.

Kamprad returned to Sweden in 2014, at age 88. He said he was homesick. Critics noted that Sweden had also reformed its tax laws to be more favorable to the wealthy.

The IKEA Effect

Kamprad's frugality had one more lasting impact, and it's one that psychologists have actually studied. It's called the "IKEA Effect."

In 2011, researchers at Harvard, Yale, and Duke published a paper showing that people place a disproportionately high value on things they've partially created. Build your own bookshelf from a flat-pack, and you'll value it more than an identical bookshelf that came pre-assembled. The labor you put in — even if it's just following instructions with an Allen wrench — creates an emotional attachment.

Kamprad probably didn't know the psychology when he started selling flat-pack furniture. But he'd stumbled onto something profound: making customers do the work didn't just save money. It made them love the product more.

That's the real genius of IKEA. It's not just cheap furniture. It's furniture you built yourself, in a store where you served yourself, that you transported yourself, designed by a company whose founder wouldn't even buy himself lunch. Every step of the experience whispers the same message: we don't waste, and neither should you.

The Legacy

Kamprad died on January 27, 2018, at age 91, at his home in Småland — the same region of Sweden where he'd been born. His net worth at death was estimated at $58.7 billion, making him one of the ten richest people who had ever lived.

He left behind 433 IKEA stores in 52 countries, a company that serves 780 million customers a year, and a business model that fundamentally changed how the world buys furniture.

He also left behind a 1993 Volvo, a collection of hotel toiletries, and somewhere, probably, a few salt packets he'd taken from a restaurant because throwing them away would have been wasteful.

The man who could have bought anything chose to buy almost nothing. Whether that makes him admirable or absurd probably depends on how you feel about salt packets. But one thing is certain: every piece of flat-pack furniture you've ever assembled, every Allen wrench you've ever cursed at, every meatball you've ever eaten in a warehouse-sized store — all of it traces back to a farm boy in southern Sweden who thought wasting money was the worst thing a person could do.

And then built a $50 billion empire proving it.