Link: https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/07/21/some-mullvad-vpn-customers-tunnel-for-exit-after-co-founder-donates-millions-to-populist-party/5275012

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."

But he profits from mullvad and your purchase contributes to these policies...

"Our CEO's opinion has no bearing on how we will act"

Idk, we seem to draw arbitrary lines for different companies. I still buy gasoline despite the horrible things the oil industry has done and is continuing to do. A VPN company providing a good anonymous service having a CEO donating to a right-wing candidate is pretty small beans by comparison

But it is still beans and people have the right to choose and the donation was significant.

a vpn costs $12; a new ev not owned by a shitty fascist costs $50,000

I'll bet he's playing the long game, support party that limits expression of free ideas, more VPN users.

mfw i'm an apathetic centrist asshole

Yes, it’s not a 1000$ donation in the privacy of his home (which is a questionable thing, but imho indeed not a Mullvad issue), but millions while openly flirting with nazis? No thanks.

Yenno you probably meant to say built but owned is still true. Teslas are such nightmare cars.

It's not about the Nazi himself, it's about him using our money to further Nazi goals.

They are so incredibly unsafe that I'm still baffled that they're allowed on the road at all.

Exactly if I recall he supplied the bulk of their funding, that's very significant

New EVs are something like $10k more expensive than comparable ICE vehicles, so there are some Chevrolet and Nissan models for ~$30k. The divide is probably even closer for used.

Any suggestions for a similarly priced, similar quality alternative for windows and Android?
I tried Nord before I switched to Mulvad and it was worse, don't want to go back to that

In which ways did you find Nord worse? I found Nord faster than Mullvad and better at spoofing my location in different countries for streaming services.

Proton VPN is probably the first other one that springs to mind as offering privacy comparable to Mullvad. Its CEO was criticized last year for making approving comments about some things Trump was doing in the USA, but it was mostly about opportunities to challenge big tech companies, and he claimed not to be a MAGA supporter in general. There was no evidence, as far as I know, of him donating to right-wing organizations.

The point of the VPN is trusting the exit node owner. People aren't going to trust when the one controlling the exit node is making large donations to a nazi party

I've seen airVPN thrown out before, not a huge fan of their UX though

mfw i'm an apathetic centrist asshole

"apathetic" and "asshole" are redundant. You can just write "i'm a centrist" and we can deduce those accompanying qualities

It’s also very slow to the point of being unusable.

I don't know much about the safety of them, just the unrepairability and the technology that makes them super dystopian. What makes them so unsafe? Besides the whole "ev batteries make fire" thing

Yeah, but our money is going into his pocket and thus funding Nazis, so that's hardly relevant to the issue.

The mechanical door is hidden and it's hard to find in an emergency, you could be trapped inside. Also some of them have "bulletproof windows" which make it difficult for rescue workers to break through and save people. There was that billionaire that accidentally reversed into her pond and couldn't get out, lots of stories like that. The cybertruck is basically a steel knife on wheels, threatening to slice up whatever unfortunate pedestrian it hits. These are just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's more.

The critical part is: how many supposed "quality" alternatives have been proven not to do any logging? Mullvad has been proven to be solid. They were raided and had jolly little to hand over to authorities on their customers.

How many of the other VPN services can say that about themselves?

Also the Cybertruck frunk will try to cut your fingers off if your fingers aren't bananas.

I'm trying out ivpn, and find it a viable alternative so far (comparing a Mullvad Wireguard config vs. ivpn app, on resp. Linux & Android)

I’ve been using airVPN for years and have never had speed issues. I will agree with the other comment on their UI/UX though, it’s straight out of the late 90’s/early 00’s. But once you’ve got it setup you don’t ever have to deal with their website.

I run a Tailscale network on my devices and I use Mullvad exit nodes, I have found that to be an extremely frictionless setup especially running on my family’s iOS devices. What are my alternatives now, I can’t seem to find anything that is as easy/practical for my setup and for non-technical users.

I’m all over the other recent thread telling people there isn’t one. Especially for what you describe there isn’t one.

I have used mullvad in a similar way and can’t recommend anything else for it.

I can recommend the book aesthetics of resistance to help apply balm to the soul of a person who wants to switch.

There are not any.

If your use case doesn’t prioritize your own safety then tell me what it is and I can help you figure something out.

That made me laugh

What a shitshow. After their blog post, anyone who didn't know, now they know. LOL. Majestic performance XD.

Proton vpn is pretty good, except on Linux where the client is horrendous. The Killswitch is very unreliable there. When it fails, it sends your machine right back to the internet instead of blocking the connection completely like it's supposed to.

I haven't found an alternative that works well for me in Linux other than mullvad unfortunately. And I really don't want to give them my money.

I sent proton a nastygram but they don't seem to care about the Linux client at all.

Also both their gui and cli apps have dependencies on Gnome, and installing gnome fucked up my remote login setup. It's insane to me that even the cli relies on gnomes keychain

What non-shitty options are there for gas? None. It's not like I can refine my own, bub.

At least with vpns we ostensibly have options

I don't know much about these things, but if Proton uses standard protocols it ought to be possible to connect without using their own client.

It can be done with wireguard but that doesn't solve the killswitch issue. I'd have to write my own script or something.

Same here. Just recently set this up. Bummed about the news.

I've found Nord to be good, ther Linux support has also picked up. I've never used Mullvad though

I'm so proud of some people

The speed was the main thing for me with Nord. Very slow a lot of the time. And I didn't like the weird/scammy feeling renewal prices. I found Mulvad much smoother in general.
Nord might be better now, though. That was my experience from about 7 years ago

"aesthetics"? Wheat and chaff, bro.

If there's an alternative that doesn't empower a nazi, although a bit less convenient, it's a no-brainer switch.

the average centrist, people

It’s a famous historical novel about the stuff people did in europe around the time of ww2.

The book is kinda big and complex but one of the things that stuck out to me is all the ways people’s different beliefs were compromised in order to accomplish different goals sometimes as imperative as survival.

It’s a pretty good book.

Anyway, like I said, there is not an alternative. If a person doesn’t actually need a bulletproof vpn then some other services might work if that person is careful about using them.

Proton vpn is pretty good, except on Linux where the client is horrendous. The Killswitch is very unreliable there. When it fails, it sends your machine right back to the internet instead of blocking the connection completely like it’s supposed to.

I have a paid proton email level, which gives me (I think?) one active VPN tunnel to use.

I tried it out and it works fine with the standard openvpn client on linux. I always set up my own killswitch, which is easy with ufw. You block all traffic except allow the VPN interface and IP. Bulletproof.

But what I really want is wireguard! I didn't know I wanted it, til I tried it. It's a lot nicer IMO than openvpn.

I moved to ivpn you could check that out

Hmm, maybe I can try the ufw approach then. Wish I knew about that before I installed gnome. Thanks for the tip.

YW!

Here's what mine looks like, but I'm redacting the tunnel IPs and port numbers. You might have to add an allow for DNS in there depending on your VPN,

xx.xx.xx.xx xxxxx    ALLOW OUT   Anywhere   <-- the VPN endpoint IP and port
Anywhere             ALLOW OUT   Anywhere on XXXXXXX <-- the interface name
Anywhere             DENY OUT    Anywhere   <-- block all but the VPN tunnel