Helene Odfjell
Source of wealth: Drilling
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Modules
Biography
Helene Odfjell is the largest shareholder of Odfjell Drilling, Norway's leading drilling and oil-services group.
The business was founded by her father Abraham Odfjell in 1973 during the early years of the country's oil boom.
She and her sister Marianne inherited Odfjell Drilling, while their brother Johan Odvar Odfjell took over the family's shipping operations in Jo Tankers. In 2015, Marianne exited the drilling company.
Helene Odfjell has been based in the U.K. for decades but relocated to Lugano, Switzerland in 2025.
She is a graduate of the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) with an MBA from London Business School.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Helene Odfjell
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Helene Odfjell, linked to Construction & Engineering and 'Drilling', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 11 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 0.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.