Fifteen years after Saab Automobile filed for bankruptcy, Victor Muller can finally answer one of the most uncomfortable questions about his time in Trollhättan without the urgency that surrounded almost everything he said in 2010 and 2011.
Would he make the same decisions again?
“Hell no.”
Yet only minutes later, when talking about the decision to proceed with the Saab acquisition despite the damage already being done to the company, his answer moves in the opposite direction.
“Am I glad we did it? Hell yes.”
That apparent contradiction is the most revealing part of a long 2026 interview with Muller. It says considerably more about his present view of Saab than another reconstruction of financing agreements, production stoppages and failed investment deals could.
The conversation originally appeared on July 3, 2026, on psychologist Caroline Middelsdorf’s Real.Raw.Authentic. podcast. On August 27, Marcus & Manuela’s Saab Channel brought the interview to its Saab audience, focusing attention on the parts concerning Muller’s attempt to save Saab Automobile and what those 21 months still mean to him.
Marcus also addressed the division that still surrounds Muller in Saab circles. He acknowledged that some enthusiasts remain strongly negative toward Saab’s final owner, while stating his own view that Muller kept the company alive for a period when it otherwise would have disappeared and helped make possible some remarkable final Saab products.
The interview itself is valuable precisely because Muller does not simply repeat that defense. At 67, with another Spyker revival underway and considerable distance from December 2011, he talks about decisions he now believes were wrong, the physical consequences of trying to keep Saab alive, and the moment he considers the most difficult of his entire business career.
A Deal Muller Still Believes Looked Extraordinary
Muller has not changed his basic assessment of why Saab looked irresistible in late 2009 and early 2010. He describes Spyker’s acquisition as the automotive equivalent of “a mouse buying an elephant”, but also as an opportunity unlikely ever to appear again.
In his current telling, Spyker effectively paid about $50 million for assets he values at roughly $1.2 billion, including approximately $200 million in cash. Those are Muller’s figures and his interpretation of the economics of the transaction, but they explain why he still refuses to characterize the acquisition itself as irrational.
To him, Saab combined an established manufacturing operation, a global dealer network, engineering capability, a new 9-5 entering the market, an unusually loyal customer base and decades of brand recognition. Spyker, by comparison, remained a tiny boutique sports car manufacturer.
“Business-wise it was a bit of an awkward deal,” Muller admits in the interview.
That is a notable choice of words from someone who spent years defending the logic of the transaction. Yet he immediately adds that it was also a “once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Both statements can be true. The price of an asset and the amount of capital required to stabilize, restart and develop it are two different questions. Saab’s experience under Spyker would expose that difference with brutal speed.
“Hell No”: The Decision Muller Says He Would Change
The strongest passage begins when Muller is asked whether, knowing everything he knows today, he would make the same decisions again.
His response is immediate: “Hell no.”
He then identifies what he regards as the single most damaging element surrounding the acquisition: General Motors had already begun the process of winding Saab down while negotiations for a buyer continued.
The timing is important. GM announced that Saab would be wound down after the Spyker negotiations initially collapsed in December 2009. A binding agreement with Spyker was subsequently reached on January 26, 2010, and the acquisition was completed on February 23. GM itself stated at closing that the previously announced Saab wind-down was ending.
Muller argues that the damage caused during that period was never fully repaired after Spyker took control.
His analogy in the 2026 interview is unusually blunt. He compares the transaction to buying a house after the seller has already set it on fire, while still being expected to complete the deal on the terms negotiated before the fire.
Looking back, Muller says he should have stopped and told GM that the circumstances had fundamentally changed. Instead, he proceeded. The reason he gives is not a balance-sheet calculation. By that stage, he says, he had committed himself too deeply to Saab’s employees to walk away.
“So we took the house although it was on fire.”
In hindsight, he says, they should not have done so. Then comes the sentence that defines his current position: he is nevertheless glad that they tried, because without the acquisition he believes the wind-down would simply have continued until Saab Automobile was gone.
This is where the 2026 Muller becomes more interesting than the executive defending Saab in real time. He no longer needs to argue that every decision was correct. He separates the quality of a decision from the reason he made it.
The Day He Had to Face Saab’s Employees
When asked about the most difficult moment of his career, Muller does not choose a financing collapse, an argument with GM, the failure of a Chinese investment proposal or the later criminal proceedings in Sweden.
He chooses the moment when he had to tell Saab’s employees that it was over.
Muller recalls gathering approximately 3,700 employees at the factory and addressing them himself.
“We tried. We gave everything humanly possible. It didn’t work,” is how he remembers the message.
Years later, he unexpectedly found a memory stick containing a video recording of that speech. Watching it again, he says, was difficult even after more than a decade had passed.
There is a tendency to remember December 19, 2011 through the photographs outside Vänersborg District Court, the bankruptcy documents and the final headlines. Muller’s account brings the story back inside Stallbacka. Whatever judgment one makes about the decisions that led there, thousands of employees were discovering that morning that a company many had spent their working lives building could no longer continue.
Muller calls delivering that message “the single most difficult moment” of his business life.
Four Hours of Sleep for a Year
The interview also gives an unusually specific description of what the final Saab year did to him physically.
Muller says that during the year leading to December 19, 2011, he does not believe he averaged more than four hours of sleep per night. By the end, he describes himself as “physically a wreck.”
He says it took approximately three months after the bankruptcy to recover physically. Mental pressure, he claims, was something he could continue to handle. Physical exhaustion was becoming another matter entirely.
His description of 2011 also strips away the convenient shorthand that Saab simply “ran out of money.” Muller remembers simultaneous battles involving financiers, banks, governments, unions, suppliers and lawyers.
“It was one battle after another, day in day out,” he says.
Eventually those individual problems began reinforcing one another. A supplier stops delivering because of concerns over payment. Production interruptions hurt cash flow and confidence. Negative information makes potential financiers more cautious. Additional financing takes longer. That delay gives suppliers another reason to worry.
Muller calls the result a “perfect storm.”
He believes they managed to keep that increasingly unstable system under some degree of control for roughly nine months. Eventually, they could not.
“My Biggest Single Wound”
There is another phrase in the interview that deserves attention because Muller does not use it for Spyker’s financial problems or either of that company’s bankruptcies.
He uses it for Saab.
“That’s my biggest single wound. Easily my biggest single wound.”
The significance is not that Muller remains emotionally attached to Saab. That has never been difficult to detect. What is different is the way he now frames failure. He does not claim that heroic effort makes the outcome successful. In fact, one of his clearest statements comes much later in the interview when he talks about looking at himself in the mirror.
If he had stopped fighting for Saab while he still believed there was a possible route forward, Muller says he would have spent the rest of his life looking at the man who gave up.
Instead, his conclusion is harsher but easier for him to accept. He failed, but he believes he exhausted every possibility available to him. In his words, that makes the failure “bearable. Not acceptable, but bearable.”
For Saab enthusiasts who followed every new funding proposal during 2011, this may be the best explanation Muller has given for something that often seemed incomprehensible at the time: why he continued producing one rescue proposal after another even as the practical room for maneuver became vanishingly small.
The Chinese Investor Irony
Muller also returns to one of his longest-standing frustrations. After Saab’s bankruptcy, most of its assets were acquired by National Electric Vehicle Sweden, NEVS, a company backed by Asian investors.
He finds that deeply ironic because attempts during his own ownership to bring Chinese capital into Saab became entangled with approvals, ownership structures, GM technology licenses and other restrictions.
His shorthand version in the interview is that they were prevented from bringing Chinese investors into Saab, only for a Chinese-backed company to acquire the assets afterward.
There is, however, one part of his account that Saab enthusiasts will immediately want qualified. Muller says that NEVS soon lost the Saab name and that “never another Saab was built.” Strictly speaking, that compresses the history too far.
NEVS secured a license from Saab AB to use the SAAB name, without the Griffin symbol, in 2012. It then restarted production of Saab-badged 9-3 Aero Sedans in Trollhättan in December 2013. Production stopped again in May 2014, and NEVS subsequently lost permission to use the Saab name during its financial restructuring.
Muller’s broader point about the irony of the ownership sequence remains clear, but the short NEVS production period should not disappear from the record.
Saab and Spyker Made Sense to Muller for a Reason Beyond Finance
One of the quieter Saab passages in the interview concerns why Muller felt such an affinity between Spyker and Saab in the first place. It was not only an acquisition opportunity.
Spyker’s historic identity included aircraft production, reflected in its propeller and wire-wheel emblem. Muller built the modern Spyker around that aviation history, treating its cars as machines that might have evolved had the original company survived continuously beyond the 1920s.
Saab approached the same connection from the opposite direction. It began as an aircraft manufacturer and moved into automobiles after World War II. Muller describes the resulting cars as essentially aircraft thinking translated to machines with wheels, and says this created considerable “interconnectivity” between Saab and Spyker.
Financially, he admits, the scale difference was absurd. Culturally and aesthetically, he still considers the pairing logical.
The Saab Court Case He Says Made Him Stronger
The Saab story did not end for Muller on December 19, 2011. Years later he, former Saab executives and others connected with the company faced an extensive Swedish economic-crime investigation and trial. In the 2026 interview Muller describes the proceedings with the same combative language he uses for Saab’s final months.
He recalls speaking to the court for approximately four hours without prepared notes, explaining the decisions and events that had led to the charges. His account is understandably his own and strongly critical of the prosecution.
The outcome, however, is not a matter of interpretation. In April 2017, Vänersborg District Court acquitted all seven defendants. Prosecutors appealed parts of the ruling, including the serious fraud charge concerning Muller. In February 2018, the Court of Appeal for Western Sweden also acquitted him, finding that the statements at issue were not misleading in a way that established criminal liability.
Muller says the legal process placed a cloud over him for roughly five years, but he now describes surviving it as another lesson in resilience.
That perspective is easier to express after an acquittal than during an investigation, but it also helps explain why the Saab period continues to occupy such an unusual place in his personal history. The company failed in 2011, yet the consequences followed him for years afterward.
Would He Do It Again?
This is where the interview becomes much more useful than another argument over whether Victor Muller “saved” or “destroyed” Saab.
Marcus & Manuela’s Saab Channel openly takes the sympathetic position. Marcus argues that, despite the hostility Muller still receives from some observers, he gave Saab additional time and helped make possible an important final period for the brand.
Others will continue to point to inadequate capitalization, unrealistic sales assumptions, the production crisis of 2011 and the fact that the rescue ultimately failed. Those arguments are not erased by Muller’s memories.
But Muller himself is no longer presenting the choice in those terms.
Asked whether he would make the same decisions with the benefit of hindsight, his answer is no. He believes some of them should have been taken differently. Most importantly, he now says the damage caused during GM’s wind-down should have fundamentally changed how Spyker approached the purchase.
Asked whether he is glad they nevertheless tried, his answer is yes. That distinction may be the most candid assessment he has offered of his Saab years.
He does not need to believe every decision was correct in order to believe the attempt was worth making. Nor does he pretend persistence was enough. Saab Automobile still went bankrupt. The factory stopped. The organization that had developed the 900, 9000, two generations of 9-3 and two very different generations of 9-5 was broken apart.
What Muller insists on retaining is something narrower: that when the final opportunity disappeared, it was not because he had voluntarily stopped looking for another one.
Fifteen years later, the man who signed the deal that pulled Saab out of GM’s wind-down can finally say both things at once. He would change the decisions. He would not erase the fight.
Sources: Marcus & Manuela’s Saab Channel, Victor Muller interview presentation, August 27, 2026; Real.Raw.Authentic. with Caroline Middelsdorf, original interview, July 3, 2026.
Spyker’s logo includes: “Nulla Tenaci Invia Est Vía” – What ever folks say about Victor Muller, he did exemplify this in his attempts to keep SAAB alive. I’m glad he tried. Wishing him all the best, along with the team there, where ever they are now. The folks left at NEVS have continued in that spirit.
I miss Saab cars.
The die was cast back in the 1980s when the Wallenberg heirs decided to sell out. If Ford had completed their deal things would have turned out well for both Saab and Ford. Instead they bought Land Rover Jaguar which saved a company that deserved to fail. To have bought Saab would have saved Ford billions! General Motors however is the place where car brands go to die and it has been that way since Billy Durant founded the company at the beginning of the last century. GM went bankrupt and Ford didn’t. Saab was collateral damage ultimately. To my mind everything that happened after GM became involved was preordained. Saab was that last car in the world that should ever have been “Badge Engineered.” They were very special and unique, they became the best Opels ever made.