Jeff Rabhan, writing for The Hollywood Reporter:
With a market cap now topping $145 billion, Spotify is worth more than most of the companies it licenses music from. Universal is valued at $56B. Warner? Just over $15.5 billion. And Ek? He’s sold more than $800 million in stock since 2023 alone — more than many of the songwriters on the platform have made combined. That’s not just a bad look. It’s a stat you can’t explain away.
Yes, he earned it. He helped assemble the biggest music library on earth. But when the guy holding the keys to the industry cashes out like a Silicon Valley titan while songwriters are still being paid like baristas, something’s broken. Ek’s net worth is closing in on $10 billion according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. He can afford to lead — and it won’t cost him much to do it.