Mullvad's co-owner privately funded a political party. Should that move your VPN trust?

A donation, a privacy brand, and a question about where trust lives

A Swedish outlet, Flamman, reported that Daniel Berntsson, one of two co-founders and co-CEOs of Mullvad VPN, was the largest private donor to the Örebro Party (Örebropartiet), a small local party based in the Örebro municipality. Reporting in the thread put the sum in the millions of Swedish kronor; one commenter noted that this converts to roughly $500K USD, and added that the party reportedly took about 75% of all its donations from him last year.

The party itself is hard to label, and the thread spent a great deal of energy on it without resolution. Founded in 2014 by Markus Allard after his expulsion from the Left Party, the Örebro Party mixes positions usually coded left (lower politician salaries, free dental care, a 30-hour work week) with a strict immigration-and-assimilation stance and support for large-scale "remigration." Wikipedia describes it as having been called both right-wing populist and left-wing populist. The relevant fact for Mullvad's users is narrower: the donor is a part-owner of a company whose entire brand is built on values.

That brand is why the news landed where it did. Mullvad is widely cited as a privacy leader, chosen by users who paid for it because of what it claims to stand for. The original Mastodon post that drove the HN thread has since been deleted; the discussion was merged from several submissions by a moderator, which is why the timestamps below run out of order.

The other CEO walks into the thread

Most posts wrote about Mullvad as though Berntsson were its sole owner. The company's other co-founder corrected that in person:

"Mullvad has two owners, founders, and CEOs - Daniel Berntsson, and me, Fredrik Strömberg… It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission." — Fredrik Strömberg, co-founder of Mullvad VPN

From there the thread split along a single question: does a co-owner's private spending change what a privacy company is worth to you? Several long-time customers said yes, and tied it to the brand's own values framing:

"in the end I just don't want my money supporting anti-people causes." — a subscriber who looked up the ownership structure before deciding

The counter-position separated the product from the person, resting on the one thing a no-logs VPN can be measured by:

"I use Mullvad because it physically prevents anyone from logging my data. What a co-owner does with his personal money in a local Swedish municipal election has zero impact on the code protecting my traffic." — a developer who checked the party's platform before commenting

One reader asked the question the whole thread was circling, without pretending to answer it:

"does it change your trust in the company? For some people, the answer is obviously yes. For others, they'll judge Mullvad purely by its track record, audits, and technical design." — a dev-tools founder weighing the trust question

A quieter voice pointed at the consistency problem hovering over the cancel-and-switch instinct: those leaving for ExpressVPN or Proton are trading an audited provider with a known track record for owners they've examined far less. The practical residue of a 1,200-comment fight is a narrow, awkward question each user has to settle alone — whether "trust" in an infrastructure provider is a property of its math and its audits, or of the people who happen to own it.