Europe's most valuable listed company is controlled by a charity, and the mechanism is ordinary enough that it usually goes unexamined.
Novo Holdings A/S held A and B shares equivalent to about 28.1% of Novo Nordisk A/S's share capital and about 77.3% of the votes at the end of 2025. The A shares carry ten votes each; the B shares carry one. That produces a Control Wedge of roughly 49 percentage points from a structure any reader of a US proxy would recognise immediately.
What makes it worth a profile is the layer above the share class. Novo Holdings is wholly owned by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, a Danish commercial foundation — an entity with no shareholders and no owners in the ordinary sense. The chain therefore terminates. Ask who owns the company that controls Novo Nordisk and the honest answer is nobody: the foundation owns itself, and its board is self-perpetuating within the terms of its charter.
Why the wedge understates the position
A 49-point wedge suggests a controller who is strongly entrenched but still sitting on a measurable stake that could, in principle, be sold down. That framing does not transfer here.
The A shares are not held by a founder who might eventually diversify, retire, or die — the three events that most often unwind a dual-class structure. They are held by a foundation whose stated purpose includes maintaining that holding. The usual erosion paths are closed not by a charter provision but by the identity of the holder.
This is the distinction the wedge alone cannot draw, and it is why durability is recorded separately from the percentages. Two companies can post identical wedges and be one succession away and zero successions away from losing them.
What is not established here
The precise figures. Novo reports "about" 28.1% and "about" 77.3%, and does not publish decimals for either, so the 49-point wedge above is approximate on both sides.
The foundation's internal governance is also outside these sources. Who appoints the foundation's board, what majorities that board needs, and what its charter actually requires of the shareholding are the questions that decide how durable this really is, and answering them requires the foundation's own charter rather than the company's annual report.