You cannot make sense of Ingvar Kamprad and IKEA without taking a moment to look at how Scandinavian culture is very different from American culture. First, we should talk about the infamous "Jantelagen":
> The Law of Jante is the description of a pattern of group behaviour towards individuals within Nordic countries that negatively portrays and criticises individual success and achievement as unworthy and inappropriate. (...) Used generally in colloquial speech in the Nordic countries as a sociological term to describe a condescending attitude towards individuality and success, the term refers to a mentality that diminishes individual effort and places all emphasis on the collective, while simultaneously denigrating those who try to stand out as individual achievers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
(It should be noted that these days, Jantelagen as petty as described here does not really apply so much to urban Scandinavian culture, but rural areas can still be very much like this)
Kamprad grew up on a farm in a small village in the 1930s, so we can be fairly certain that this attitude was part of the social values that he grew up with. That is enough to explain why Kamprad did not show off wealth: it would be considered offensive back home.
It is also easy to imagine how one can consider cheapness a positive character trait with this mindset. So I am inclined to believe that Kamprad sincerely did not care about money despite his billions, at least not in the "American" sense.
Jantelagen may also be part of why back in the seventies, Scandinavia was one of the earliest places to embrace principles of Participatory Design: design done together with the people being designed for[0]. Interestingly, in that same period Kamprad wrote "The Testament of a Furniture Dealer"[1]. It does a lot to explain how from the Kamprad/IKEA perspective, being a force of good in the world for the have-nots is not at odds with making tons of money. It reads like political manifesto, except written by someone who can only see the world from the point of view of furniture business. I suppose it kind of is. Just look at the opening paragraphs:
> To create a better everyday life for the many people by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them. We have decided once and for all to side with the many. What is good for our customers is also, in the long run, good for us. This is an objective that carries obligations.
> All nations and societies in both the East and West spend a disproportionate amount of their resources on satisfying a minority of the population. In our line of business, for example, far too many of the fine designs and new ideas are reserved for a small circle of the affluent. That situation has influenced the formulation of our objectives.
> After only a couple of decades, we have achieved good results. A well-known Swedish industrialist-politician has said that IKEA has meant more for the process of democratisation than many political measures put together. We believe, too, that our actions have inspired many of our colleagues to work along the same lines.
> But we have great ambitions. We know that we can be a beneficial influence on practically all markets. We know that in the future we will be able to make a valuable contribution to the process of democratisation outside our own homeland too. We know that larger production runs give us new advantages on our home ground, as well as more markets to spread our risks over. That is why it is our duty to expand.
So how did Kamprad reconcile being successful and making tons of money on the one hand, with social values "that diminish individual effort and places all emphasis on the collective" on the other? Beyond his own frugality, he oriented his ambitions towards producing for the collective. Note that this is not a self-evident business model! Plenty of businesses maximise the perceived value of their products through the idea of exclusivity (supercars and wrist-watches come to mind). When is the last time you saw that attitude applied to an IKEA product? Nobody brags about having a Lack table at home. You know what does fit the IKEA ethos? The Lack Rack, and IKEA hackers[2][3].
As far as I can tell, the internal culture of IKEA reflects this as well. I am originally from the Netherlands, but studied a master in Interaction Design in Malmö University, and have been living in Sweden for five years in total. A number of the people that I studied with ended up working for IKEA. Through them I get the impression that they truly believe in "the cause" of making affordable designs for everyone. You can also see it in IKEA's approach to sustainability[4].
Anyway, the point is that for Kamprad, maximising profits for a successful business, and this business working for the benefit of everyone was not at odds. Keep that in mind and a lot of things about IKEA start making a lot more sense.
As for the IKEA foundation, yeah, it's pretty shady. It would be interesting to look beyond the tax-evasion construction and see how guilty IKEA is of other dubious business practices like externalising costs - that is, whether or not these other practices were as easy to reconcile with a frugal mindset.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design#History_i...
[1] http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/pdf/reports-downloads/the-testa...
[2] https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack
[3] https://www.ikeahackers.net/
[4] https://www.greenbiz.com/article/ikea-argues-businesses-go-a...
