Swedish VPN vendor Mullvad is facing a backlash from some customers after co-founder Daniel Berntsson personally donated SEK 5 million (£385,000, $519,000) to the controversial populist Örebropartiet, which is running in Sweden’s national elections for the first time.
Berntsson has this week published a blog post explaining the donation, alongside posts titled “Immigration,” “Political individualism,” and “Moral individualism.” Before that, he had not posted since 2019.
The flurry of posts follows weeks of customer criticism over the donation – for example, Finnish blog Moonwriting’s post “I’m done with Mullvad.” Another blog, Unutterable, is more direct: “Mullvad funding the far-right and the problem with tech company ownership.” The Hacker News discussion thread about the donations has reached a remarkable 1,784 comments so far.
Mullvad was co-founded and is still jointly owned and run by two CEOs, Berntsson and Fredrik Strömberg. Its name, as reflected in the company’s logo, is Swedish for “mole.” It also offers the Mullvad Browser, a privacy-enhanced fork of Firefox ESR co-developed with the Tor Project. Swedish socialist newspaper Flamman (“The Flame”) revealed the donation in its story “High-profile techie gives millions to the Örebro Party.”
In a post on X, the company said it was devoted to freedom of speech and tolerance, saying: “It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission, in the same way that someone’s opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn’t.”
If they are rich they are almost always a right wing asshole. Why would anyone be surprised by this?
Wealth needs limits
I always say there should be a hard cutoff at a million a year and you should be taxed 100% at anything over that.
Even from a capitalist perspective this makes sense. Money pooling at the top is money not moving through the economy; 100% taxes encourage reinvestment and philanthropy to avoid the tax.
I’m not educated here - how is the money not moving through the economy? Billionaires and trillionaires surely keep their money in a bank / investment accounts right?
I’m not going to find them now, but if you’re interested, there are a lot of studies that look at how money moves through the economy and which dollars are more impactful. While dollars saved do get reinvested in a roundabout way, their economic impact is pennies on the dollar compared to direct spending or investment into business. It’s just far better for any market economy to prevent dollars from pooling into savings beyond simple prudence and is far better to put them directly to work via spending.
I think it would be more effective to have a hard wealth (both liquid and non-liquid assets) cutoff of somewhere between $10-50 million rather than a cap on an annual income.
Both
Wealth need not exist at all.
The point of wealth is heyying around limits. You cannot continue to have fungible personal wealth without corruption. It doesn’t even work on a hypothetical philosophical level.
Yeah, literally 99.999% of products you buy in 2026 fund right wing fascism, and most of it you can’t escape because they own the entire supply chain.
Ain’t capitalism fun?
It really is a matter of degree, though. Even fancy perfume has horse piss in it. It doesn’t mean you might as well wallow in the pigpen.
Per his blog he’s a “libertarian anarchist”.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
->libertarian.
I always read that as ‘far right, but kinda ashamed, or can’t get laid by claiming it so….’
It means “I want to do bad things without consequences” just like free speech absolutist means “I want to say bad things and no one is allowed to call me names”.
In the US I’ve been saying “Libertarian is a Republican who wants to smoke weed.” But seeing as they’re not villianizing it much anymore the Libertarians really don’t have a talking point left in the country.
Totes.
Libertarians are the most laughable spineless morons that I can think of. 99% hypocrisy and 1% innovation.