Picture two men. One is worth tens of billions of dollars, one of the wealthiest people alive. The other drives an aging Volvo, flies at the back of the plane, and buys his clothes secondhand.

They are the same person. In 2006, when Forbes put Ingvar Kamprad’s fortune at around $28 billion and fourth in the world, he was still driving an old car and shrugging off the label people kept reaching for.

That’s the gap I keep circling. Not the wealth, and not the thrift on its own. The odd part is that a man who could have bought anything chose, for decades, to look like he couldn’t afford much at all.

A fortune with the tags left on

Kamprad founded IKEA in 1943, at seventeen, on his family’s farm in southern Sweden. He turned it into the world’s biggest furniture retailer. By the time he died in January 2018, Bloomberg put his net worth at $58.7 billion, making him the eighth-richest person in the world.

Set that number next to the car. When a Swiss television crew asked him about his Volvo in 2006, he waved off its age with a line that followed him ever since. “It is nearly new, just 15 years old, or something like that,” he said. The car was reportedly a 1993 Volvo 240, which he drove for roughly two decades.

The frugality, itemized

The Volvo was not a one-off.

Kamprad flew economy, avoided luxury hotels, and bought clothes at flea markets and, according to reports, recycled tea bags. He wasn’t apologetic about it. “People say I am cheap and I don’t mind if they do,” he told an interviewer. “But I am very proud to follow the rules of our company.”

That last clause is the tell. For Kamprad, the penny-pinching was a management tool as much as a habit. “If there is such a thing as good leadership, it is to give a good example. I have to do so for all the IKEA employees.” Around that time IKEA had roughly 90,000 employees worldwide, and the old car was, in his telling, a message aimed at them too.

He had written the same idea down thirty years earlier. In his 1976 manifesto, “The Testament of a Furniture Dealer,” Kamprad wrote: “It is not just to cut costs that we avoid luxury hotels. We do not need fancy cars, posh titles, tailor-made uniforms or other status symbols.” In his case, the stated value and daily practice seem to have matched for a long time.

Where the thrift gets complicated

The clean story about a modest billionaire gets muddier on closer inspection. The same instinct that kept costs down inside the stores also appears, at the corporate level, in an ownership structure where tax was one consideration.

IKEA was split between two foundation-owned groups: the retail-heavy INGKA side under a Dutch foundation, and Inter IKEA, owner and franchisor of the IKEA concept, under the Liechtenstein-based Interogo Foundation. In an academic account, Steen Thomsen writes that Liechtenstein was chosen primarily because its foundation law suited long-term company ownership, but secondarily “for tax reasons” and as insurance against political risk.

Reading the creed

So what actually drove the flea market clothes and the fifteen-year-old car? My read is that it was closer to restlessness than worry about money. The clearest window into it is the way the manifesto ends. Its ninth and final chapter begins: “Most things still remain to be done. A glorious future!”

Read the two things together and they stop looking like separate quirks. Comfort, to a man who believed most of the work was still ahead of him, was perhaps a kind of stopping too soon. A new car, a nice hotel, a status symbol: each one quietly says you’ve arrived.

Kamprad seems to have been allergic to arriving. He put the same feeling another way in the manifesto, calling the feeling of finishing something “an effective sleeping pill.” That’s a man who found rest slightly suspicious.