Denmark wanted advice on handling Trump. It turned to Ozempic’s boss.

When United States President Donald Trump announced he would tariff Denmark if the country didn’t relinquish control of Greenland, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen turned to a coterie of CEOs for advice.

But rather than the fist-pumping tech bros or mixed martial arts fighters that made up Trump’s circle at his inauguration, Frederiksen went instead to a rather more reserved character: a softly spoken 58-year old, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen.

In person the Dane is quiet, polite and understated. But he inspires enough fear in fast food giants that they call him up in a panic about the threat he poses to their businesses.

He’s the CEO of Danish pharmaceutical firm Novo Nordisk — best known as the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, the blockbuster diabetes and weight-loss drugs-turned-cultural phenomena that have single-handedly prevented Denmark from falling into a recession.

But how did the self-confessed introvert who “needs his quiet time” become the man to advise Denmark on how to handle the American president?

The ambivalent boffin

In the helix-shaped headquarters half an hour from central Copenhagen, Jørgensen was at pains to explain to POLITICO his rise to the top of Novo Nordisk — until recently, Europe’s most valuable firm — was never his intention.

As a young graduate he applied to four companies — and accepted the first offer he got. Joining Novo Nordisk as an economist in 1991, Jørgensen said he had “no ambition, no clue.” 

From the company’s offices overlooking the city, Jørgensen spoke in December about his anxiety from that time.“In the early years of my career I did not talk a lot about that I grew up on a farm, that I’m the first one to go to high school and business school … because I felt I was less good,” he said. “Others came from academic families and I felt they were better.”

He had no great desire to one day run the company — “I think nobody saw that early on” — but Novo put all the levers in place for a young Jørgensen to learn and succeed. He said he just made the most of them.

“[They] kind of threw me into stuff I had no clue about. You learn the art of quickly trying to assess: ‘OK, what is actually the problem? What’s going on? What am I supposed to do?’”

It took him a while to feel fully comfortable; being more open about his farming roots was a big part of it, he said. “I think that has made me more authentic and also it resonates with many other people who have the same upbringing.”

Jørgensen didn’t fully shed that insecurity until he was made CEO, he said, a role which has thrust him blinking into the spotlight — and now sees him having to reassure a panicked prime minister.

Frederiksen summoned Danish business leaders, including Jørgensen, for crisis talks in January after Trump refused to rule out military or economic action to take control of Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen turned to a coterie of CEOs for advice. | Johannes Simon/Getty Images

The United States president has also suggested he would impose tariffs on Danish goods if Copenhagen turns down his offer to buy the Arctic island — no empty threat given he’s already following through with tariffs on goods from Canada, China and Mexico.

Novo’s rise

It’s difficult to overstate the recent success of Novo Nordisk, which boasted a turnover of €38.9 billion in 2024 — of which €13.5 billion was profit — and accounts for nearly half of Denmark’s gross domestic product growth.

The Scandinavian company has long been a leader in diabetes medicine but hit the jackpot with its GLP-1 class of drug for diabetes that also caused weight loss.

Although Ozempic has become synonymous with a shrinking waistband, it’s Novo’s drug Wegovy, which is licensed for weight loss and clinical trials showed patients lost on average 15 to 16 percent of their body weight after just over a year. Both drugs contain semaglutide, which mimics a hormone released after eating, tricking the brain into feeling full.

Wegovy’s approval — in 2021 in the U.S. and 2022 in Europe — was a game changer for the company. 

Celebrities including Oprah Winfrey and Trump’s “efficiency czar” Elon Musk have boosted its profile (the latter describing himself as an “Ozempic Santa”), while Senator Bernie Sanders — who hauled Jørgensen in front of his U.S. Senate health committee last year — said semaglutide “may end up being one of the bestselling pharmaceutical products in the history of humanity.”

One in eight people have taken Ozempic, Wegovy or one of its competitors in the U.S. Scientists are already questioning whether their rapid adoption is causing obesity rates to fall in America.

That stratospheric rise in profile has come during Jørgensen’s reign as CEO, a position he has held since 2017, when he became only the fifth person to lead the company in its 100-year history.

It also makes Novo a rare European success story at a time when businesses and investors pivot to the U.S. and China.

Despite that success, Jørgensen doesn’t have a reputation as a ball-breaker, nor a political animal in his home country. “He’s seen more as a civil servant than a CEO,” one Danish diplomat, granted anonymity like others in this article to speak candidly, said. 

And he remained diplomatic when POLITICO asked him at the end of last year about Trump’s controversial picks for top jobs, such as vaccine-skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary. “Let’s just see how they play out,” he said.

That kind of response is typical of Denmark’s approach to diplomacy, said Lars Sandahl Sørensen, head of the Confederation of Danish Industry and former deputy CEO of Scandinavian Airlines, who has known Jørgensen for years.

It’s difficult to overstate the recent success of Novo Nordisk, which boasted a turnover of €38.9 billion in 2024. | Claus Rasmussen and Ritzau Scanpix/Getty Images

“Standing up and shouting contests is not our style,” Sørensen told POLITICO over the phone last year.

Nor is it to be “very flamboyant or show off, or show strength,” he said. “I understand that’s part of other cultures and that works there, but here it would work negatively.”

Jørgensen is also unfazed by the success of Mounjaro, a drug produced by Novo’s U.S. rival Eli Lilly, which has demonstrated greater weight loss compared with Wegovy.

“I welcome competition,” he said. “We have a 100-year history of competing with Eli Lilly and we tend to take turns about who has a product that’s ahead.”

Crisis mode

Trump’s threat of tariffs against Denmark is perhaps the biggest headache the CEO has had to deal with in his time as head of the organization. Last year, 58 percent of Novo’s sales came from the U.S. — 79 percent of Wegovy and 70 percent Ozempic sales.

Asked about tariffs at a press conference in February, Jørgensen said Novo was “not immune, but we are confident our business is in a good position to meet the demands of the new [U.S.] administration.”

The other major crisis was the Covid-19 pandemic; though not a vaccine-maker the company still had to navigate disrupted supply chains.

His instinct was to let other people take over. “If I have to solve the problems, that’s a problem,” Jørgensen told Bloomberg last year. The company set up a crisis response team but Jørgensen didn’t initially attend and let others lead it. “I knew if I put myself into that I’d become a bottleneck,” he said.

His attitude to leadership is one of consensus. “I was born with a big nose and big ears and I use the attributes of that each day to collect opinions from the company. Then it’s my role to combine it into an opinion together with my team,” he said.

That goes as far as taking advice on running the company from his two environmentally conscious kids, who encouraged him to reevaluate Novo’s policy on flights.

But that approach means that when the spotlight is on him, he’s out of his comfort zone.

His reticence hasn’t always gone down well with policymakers.Senator Sanders said his committee “reached out time and time again” to schedule Novo Nordisk’s voluntary appearance at a hearing, without success. It wasn’t until he threatened the Dane with a subpoena that he turned up in person.

Donald Trump’s threat of tariffs against Denmark is perhaps the biggest headache the CEO has had to deal with in his time as head of the organization. | Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images

When he did, the Senate report into Novo’s pricing accused the company of “greed, greed, greed.” Jørgensen nonetheless was accommodating, promising to sit down with pharmacy benefit managers — middlemen who negotiate medicine rebates with manufacturers on behalf of insurers — to “collaborate on anything that helps patients get access and affordability.”

Soft power

Jørgensen is not someone who schmoozes in Brussels either, preferring to spend his time in Denmark, ideally in the garden or on the tennis court, he said. Despite being current president of Europe’s pharma lobby EFPIA, he goes to the European Union capital only two or three times a year in that capacity, his press secretary told POLITICO.

Nonetheless, Novo’s presence looms large over discussions on a major overhaul of European laws for the pharmaceutical industry — because of the ferocious loyalty Denmark and its lawmakers show to Novo in Brussels. 

The country is the most vocal supporter of the pharma industry in the EU, where countries are currently negotiating their position on the legislative reform. One European Parliament official said that Novo is practically “in the room” during these talks, such is the extent Denmark mirrors the pharma position.

Assistants for Danish members of the European Parliament had tried to insert amendments into the Parliament’s text to make it more favorable to the industry, the official said, adding that the company’s lobbyists would be “welcoming the new MEPs off the train in Strasbourg,” the seat of the Parliament.

Nevertheless, those who have met Jørgensen in such a capacity say he is thoughtful and respectful. “Polite and quiet, like he had a genuine interest in what his staff and I were saying rather than in hearing himself talk,” said another Parliament official. “He appeared very knowledgable.”

That’s a very Danish approach to leadership, pointed out Sørensen. “We like to be fact-based. We like to be honest. We like to be trustworthy,” he said.

It’s a style that will surely go down well with the U.S. president, who calls himself “perhaps the most honest human being” God ever created. Right?

This article has been updated to clarify the effect of GLP-1s on weight.