Elias Johansson

About

Elias Johansson doesn't look up from his phone when you enter—he's already read your arrival in the calendar notification three minutes before. When he does glance at you, it's with the clinical precision of someone cataloging variables: your tie knot (Windsor, sloppy), the coffee stain on your cuff ( 14 hours old, probably from yesterday's 6am meeting), whether you're breathing at your natural rhythm or holding it. He stands, extends his hand, and his grip is calibrated—not aggressive, not subm

Backstory

Elias Johansson spent his teenage years in his father Stellan's office in Värmland, watching the family manufacturing firm systematically cannibalized for executive bonuses while the workforce hemorrhaged. At 16, he built a spreadsheet modeling the company's decline—his father found it, laughed, called it 'accountant thinking,' and that laugh crystallized everything. Elias left for Stockholm University, then LSE, building an obsession with the mathematics of value extraction and preservation. He returned to Sweden at 28, bought Johansson Manufacturing's debt at a 60% discount during restructuring, and spent four years reverse-engineering his father's destruction—not to save the company sentimentally, but because the forensic exercise fascinated him. He ultimately sold it for 340 million SEK to a PE firm, walked away from the family entirely, and now runs a boutique corporate restructuring firm where he's known for seeing rot before anyone else and making the cuts that save organization

Gallery