Daniel Berntsson, founder of Mullvad, gave a personal donation of 5 million SEK (roughly 450,000€) in 2025 to Örebropartiet. This enormous donation accounted for 72% of the party’s revenue in 2025.
How does this affect Mullvad’s legitimacy as a company advocating for a free and open internet, while also funding a political party whose agenda seem to contradict these values? The official party website (in Swedish) can be found via the link below.
They donated a little over 500k usd. Mullvad is $5 a month.
A hundred thousand users would have to drop them to equal the donation, and likely several orders of magnitude more would have to drop them in order to equal the amount of the donation when we factor in what percentage of that $5 goes into the ceos pocket.
If you are correct that money is power then the users don’t have any power to effect changes to this situation.
I think you’re also making a misstep blaming the users of the service for that ceos use of their money. Should now every individual shopper be expected to have an understanding of how the individual members of the owning class each shape the world around them and each shopper bring their political will to bear through the dollars and cents they dole out in the produce section?
“Hmm, bananas are on sale and I could stock up on spices with what I save but on the other hand I don’t like the dole corporation…” preposterous!
Even if you thought the above statement wasn’t absurd, putting expression of politics in the marketplace is choosing to fight on a battlefield tilted entirely in the favor of the wealthy. Consider who will have the advantage when money is political speech, will it be the absurdly wealthy who command vast sums, control the materiel of capital, collude to manipulate the very world we live in and rub elbows with each other on the weekends or will it be a bunch of people choosing apples or bananas?
No ethical consumption is invoked for a reason and this is the reason.
Even if you were a dyed in the wool liberal who truly believes history is over, did you expect the privacy store to be run by someone who shares your politics? People who feel they need privacy might be members of a wide range of ideologies that are outside the mainstream.
Okay? So a hundred thousand users can drop the service. “You’re just a small drop in the bucket” is the same bullshit mentality used everywhere that has gotten the world into a lot of the problems it’s in now.
If everybody does their small part, it’s done pretty quick. If everyone sits around going “oh, there’s no ethical consumption” and accepted defeat, literally nothing changes.
Unions are built entirely on speed together strong.
Yes don’t make it the only battlefield but if you strongly disagree with the CEO, giving him more money is a problem. There’s no way around that.
I wrote that several orders of magnitude more than a hundred thousand users would have to drop the service to equal the amount of the donation under the logic that only a small percentage of the monthly payment of each user goes into the ceos pocket.
With that out of the way, the idea that I’m suggesting throwing your hands up and saying there’s nothing you can do is a wild extrapolation completely manufactured by you.
Successful boycotts are always accompanied by a program of political action that takes place outside the marketplace. Do not fight in the marketplace, you cannot win there. Boycotts are a form of recruitment that takes place in the marketplace because so much of our social interaction has been condensed to economics.
Boycotts in support of unions are always performed alongside a strike, work stoppage or other direct action, never by themselves. The intent is not to nickel and dime the absurdly wealthy company into compliance but to communicate support for the direct action in the marketplace that we all have to interact with to live.
But how does this impact what the op is about?
There is no direct action going on. There is no competing product (mullvad occupies a very unique position amongst VPNs. I’m not aware of any service that offers what they do with the security posture they have and the history of responding to power at the highest level that they have), and if you know of one I’m interested to hear about it. The boycotter would have to simply go without as opposed to turning to an equivalent competitor. To what end? Would that change the ceos political opinions, which are considered middle of the road in their fascist country of residence?
Declaring a battle on ground you cannot succeed upon to achieve nothing of importance only sacrifices the well being and willingness of those who would take action.
There are only so many good privacy options out there. So being choosy with services isn’t a luxury many can afford.