Mullvad co-CEO Fredrik Strömberg confirmed that neither Mullvad VPN AB, its parent company Amagicom AB, nor its sister company Tillitis AB played any role in supporting the political party.
It doesn’t matter if the company itself was directly involved or not, the money came from the company, and from its’ customers.
I’m not taking side here, but to be fair, Elon Musk is a shitty person doing shitty things both professionally and private. Mullvad VPN is at least only doing good things!
With that said. I have stopped using Mullvad VPN for now. We’ll see how this all plays out.
gonna get downvoted to hell here but making EVs and charging infrastructure is a good thing. also rooftop solar and batteries.
still, fuck nazi elon.
edit: this isn’t even about “credit” for developing the tech or whatever. even if we all agree this stuff was going to happen with or without elon, the Tesla business is still putting these products on the market. That is good, just like Mullvad and VPN. They didn’t invent VPN or anything, they are just one (good) provider.
The only issue with Tesla is that the quality of their cars is mediocre at best, while you’re paying premium, and that Tesla is the most childish and obstinate company to work with.
We have something called Råd & Rön’s Blacklist, which is respected Swedish consumer magazine’s list of products to avoid. Tesla is one of the brands that’s listed there. Partly because of the poor quality of the cars and partly because they don’t follow the rulings from the National Board for Consumer Complaints here in Sweden.
And they don’t give a **** about insurance companies either. If something happens to your Tesla, you’re on your own buying a new one yourself. You can forget about getting any sort of help from Tesla.
The cars since 2020 have been decent quality. What you are paying for is an EV with good range and good power. Tesla definitely pushed the U.S. ev adoption ahead by a number of years.
I’m curious about how that board works - is it a judicial system that other car manufacturers follow? What kind of rulings have they made against Tesla? I found that Tesla follows their own warranty quite well, and after that I don’t think any a car manufacturers will fix stuff for free.
And what support do you expect to get regarding insurance? You can buy a bew car like anyone, can’t you?
German source, since murica doesn’t have mandatory safety inspections. Literally no other car brand has a higher failure rate than Tesla, and the car with the highest failure rate was the Model Y, which released in 2022
Interesting. Seems that most the failures are the breaks because the pads get rusty with non-use because of the regenerative breaking. The Tesla manuals say to use the breaks fully every once in a while, but of course people don’t read the manual. And it just make then grunchy - they work fine. The suspension issues are real and I think the problem is that they start to go but it’s not obvious. Tesla will change them in warranty no problem but you have to notice the extra play and sounds, which is quite subtle. I wish we had annual safety inspections in Canada, they only do that for older cars.
The cars since 2020 have been decent quality. What you are paying for is an EV with good range and good power. Tesla definitely pushed the U.S. ev adoption ahead by a number of years.
I guess everything is relative. Tesla is still a crappy car in terms of quality here, with tons of unresolved issues with faulty cars that Tesla refused to help their customers with.
I’m curious about how that board works - is it a judicial system that other car manufacturers follow?
Råd & Rönis is an independent, non-profit consumer magazine owned by the Swedish Consumer Agency. Their funding comes from subscriptions and government grants (no advertising and no corporate money). They test products, expose bad companies and protect consumers. Their “Black List” (Svarta Listan) is highly influential, and being on it can destroy sales completely.
Customers can file a complaint at The National Board for Consumer Disputes (ARN), a government-run arbitration(?) service. Their decisions are not legally binding, but companies that ignore them get publicly shamed (and often blacklisted by Råd & Rön). Tesla has ignored basically every single case. Any remotely serious company here in Sweden comply with ARN. We take ARN very seriously here.
What kind of rulings have they made against Tesla?
Our law is equal for everyone. We don’t care if you’re some local dude selling hotdogs or Elon Musk selling Teslas.
I found that Tesla follows their own warranty quite well […]
That’s the issue. Their warranty basically means that they ignore you and will fuck you over, even if the issue is their own fault. People have ended up with repair costs close to what a new car costs, and even if it’s Teslas fault, they refuse to do shit.
[…] and after that I don’t think any a car manufacturers will fix stuff for free.
Of course they have to, if the issue is their own fault.
Sounds like a good system. But I guess it only works if people pay attention to the blacklist so it’s a good threat since it’s not enforceable. I haven’t heard of Tesla not honoring drivetrain issues under warranty here in Canada. They wouldn’t do a second windshield replacement on my wife’s T3 because what they said was evidence of a rock chip, but that was kinda fair.
I mean yeah, obviously. But Musk is very obviously excellent at marketing, and there’s an argument to be made that it was thanks to his marketing that Tesla became as popular as it did, and that that helped pull up the EV market more broadly.
Not even EVs. The work was getting done by researchers improving electric motors and batteries. As soon as the technology was viable Elon jumped on it and marketed himself as the person behind it all. Same goes for PayPal which he stole credit for, rockets that people already worked decades on, tunnels that are just bad metros, and machine learning (AI) that people were already doing since the 70’s and only recently had breakthroughs because of the increased ability to feed it data en masse.
The only credit he should get is having the power and charisma to capitalize on the work of others. He’s a Thomas Edison and not a Nikola Tesla.
Calling him Thomas Edison is giving him far too much credit. Edison may have been a self aggrandizing asshole, but he also did have a few accomplishments to his name. Musk is a glorified venture capitalist, only instead of just taking a chunk of the profits he buys the whole company so he can steal credit for the company’s achievements. Elon Musk has never created a single thing in his life. He has in fact been a net negative as every company he has ever been involved with would have been better off without Musk’s “help”.
I mean, to be fair, it was the engineers and founders who have done a lot of the work. They deserve the credit for making good products. Not Elon. He just profits off of them and the labor of the engineers.
Elon is just a propaganda machine (see his “in 4 or 5 years we’ll have datacenters in space” bullshit, or all the other things that he promised but it didn’t happen), a shame so many people fall for it.
A commonly known US analog is the Chik-Fil-A restaurant chain. They are proudly Christian and got tons of flak for donating to “traditional family” organizations that spread gay hate and so on.
They stopped, but the owner still personally donates. So every dollar you spend there still fuels those hate groups. It just takes a slightly different path.
So the question isn’t “is the company bad,” it’s “what is your money funding?”
You have that backwards. Customers of a company get to decide whether or not they want to give that company their money for any reason they fucking please
I’d also argue that no one would care if this were some mid-level manager making a donation. This is the owner of a company, not “staff.”
Morally? Yes. Customers give their say as to whether or not they want to give their money to some specific company every single time they engage in a business transaction. There is also nothing wrong with telling others to make the same consideration.
It doesn’t matter if the company itself was directly involved or not, the money came from the company, and from its’ customers.
yeah it’s like saying Elon is only a piece of shit on his free time so it’s okay
edit:
pissof shitI’m not taking side here, but to be fair, Elon Musk is a shitty person doing shitty things both professionally and private. Mullvad VPN is at least only doing good things!
With that said. I have stopped using Mullvad VPN for now. We’ll see how this all plays out.
gonna get downvoted to hell here but making EVs and charging infrastructure is a good thing. also rooftop solar and batteries.
still, fuck nazi elon.
edit: this isn’t even about “credit” for developing the tech or whatever. even if we all agree this stuff was going to happen with or without elon, the Tesla business is still putting these products on the market. That is good, just like Mullvad and VPN. They didn’t invent VPN or anything, they are just one (good) provider.
The only issue with Tesla is that the quality of their cars is mediocre at best, while you’re paying premium, and that Tesla is the most childish and obstinate company to work with.
We have something called Råd & Rön’s Blacklist, which is respected Swedish consumer magazine’s list of products to avoid. Tesla is one of the brands that’s listed there. Partly because of the poor quality of the cars and partly because they don’t follow the rulings from the National Board for Consumer Complaints here in Sweden.
And they don’t give a **** about insurance companies either. If something happens to your Tesla, you’re on your own buying a new one yourself. You can forget about getting any sort of help from Tesla.
I stopped reading what you wrote after your first sentence. There are so many other issues than that with Tesla, what dimension are you from?
The cars since 2020 have been decent quality. What you are paying for is an EV with good range and good power. Tesla definitely pushed the U.S. ev adoption ahead by a number of years.
I’m curious about how that board works - is it a judicial system that other car manufacturers follow? What kind of rulings have they made against Tesla? I found that Tesla follows their own warranty quite well, and after that I don’t think any a car manufacturers will fix stuff for free.
And what support do you expect to get regarding insurance? You can buy a bew car like anyone, can’t you?
https://www.adac.de/news/tuev-report-2026/
German source, since murica doesn’t have mandatory safety inspections. Literally no other car brand has a higher failure rate than Tesla, and the car with the highest failure rate was the Model Y, which released in 2022
Interesting. Seems that most the failures are the breaks because the pads get rusty with non-use because of the regenerative breaking. The Tesla manuals say to use the breaks fully every once in a while, but of course people don’t read the manual. And it just make then grunchy - they work fine. The suspension issues are real and I think the problem is that they start to go but it’s not obvious. Tesla will change them in warranty no problem but you have to notice the extra play and sounds, which is quite subtle. I wish we had annual safety inspections in Canada, they only do that for older cars.
I guess everything is relative. Tesla is still a crappy car in terms of quality here, with tons of unresolved issues with faulty cars that Tesla refused to help their customers with.
Råd & Rönis is an independent, non-profit consumer magazine owned by the Swedish Consumer Agency. Their funding comes from subscriptions and government grants (no advertising and no corporate money). They test products, expose bad companies and protect consumers. Their “Black List” (Svarta Listan) is highly influential, and being on it can destroy sales completely.
Customers can file a complaint at The National Board for Consumer Disputes (ARN), a government-run arbitration(?) service. Their decisions are not legally binding, but companies that ignore them get publicly shamed (and often blacklisted by Råd & Rön). Tesla has ignored basically every single case. Any remotely serious company here in Sweden comply with ARN. We take ARN very seriously here.
Our law is equal for everyone. We don’t care if you’re some local dude selling hotdogs or Elon Musk selling Teslas.
That’s the issue. Their warranty basically means that they ignore you and will fuck you over, even if the issue is their own fault. People have ended up with repair costs close to what a new car costs, and even if it’s Teslas fault, they refuse to do shit.
Of course they have to, if the issue is their own fault.
Sounds like a good system. But I guess it only works if people pay attention to the blacklist so it’s a good threat since it’s not enforceable. I haven’t heard of Tesla not honoring drivetrain issues under warranty here in Canada. They wouldn’t do a second windshield replacement on my wife’s T3 because what they said was evidence of a rock chip, but that was kinda fair.
I’m glad you have a better experience with them! :)
Here’s some reading (in Swedish) if you would like to read about it:
I didn’t have to look hard to find these. :/
Rooftop solar is definitely not something Musk can take any credit for.
EVs maybe, but charging infrastructure that he made proprietary rather than using the open standard is not especially worthy of praise.
Musk hasn’t done any of those things. People who are actually smart did them and then he pretended to do them.
I mean yeah, obviously. But Musk is very obviously excellent at marketing, and there’s an argument to be made that it was thanks to his marketing that Tesla became as popular as it did, and that that helped pull up the EV market more broadly.
Marketing from marketers that he hired. He did fuck all.
He did scam money out of govts and banks to help pay those hires though. It turns out that scamming is the most valued skill in the world.
Not even EVs. The work was getting done by researchers improving electric motors and batteries. As soon as the technology was viable Elon jumped on it and marketed himself as the person behind it all. Same goes for PayPal which he stole credit for, rockets that people already worked decades on, tunnels that are just bad metros, and machine learning (AI) that people were already doing since the 70’s and only recently had breakthroughs because of the increased ability to feed it data en masse.
The only credit he should get is having the power and charisma to capitalize on the work of others. He’s a Thomas Edison and not a Nikola Tesla.
Calling him Thomas Edison is giving him far too much credit. Edison may have been a self aggrandizing asshole, but he also did have a few accomplishments to his name. Musk is a glorified venture capitalist, only instead of just taking a chunk of the profits he buys the whole company so he can steal credit for the company’s achievements. Elon Musk has never created a single thing in his life. He has in fact been a net negative as every company he has ever been involved with would have been better off without Musk’s “help”.
Elon Musk didn’t do any of that though. Engineers did.
I mean, to be fair, it was the engineers and founders who have done a lot of the work. They deserve the credit for making good products. Not Elon. He just profits off of them and the labor of the engineers.
He didnt make shit. He saw there was opportunity and ran with it, now that he has it sustainabikity is nowhere close to his goals.
The solar tiles suck The battery is a whitelabelled product The boring company was strategic interference to stop public infrastructure development.
Those things were happening before him and continue DESPITE him. If you get downvoted it’s because you insinuated he had anything to do with that.
Elon is just a propaganda machine (see his “in 4 or 5 years we’ll have datacenters in space” bullshit, or all the other things that he promised but it didn’t happen), a shame so many people fall for it.
It is very unfortunate that ev’s and elon are linked in any way, he is not positive marketing.
Yes, but I do not give Musk credit for recognizing a good thing and then taking it from Tesla’s founders.
Yeah but it’s not exactly the south African doing those things, if anything they are doing them despite him.
An issue for those of us in the southern hemisphere, where mullvad is the only decent choice… but one of their founders is clearly not decent.
Mullvad VPN is popularizing crypto
They are? How?
They’re offering discounts for paying with monero
Monero is anonymous, so it makes sense.
It’s still crypto, with all the downsides of crypto.
Do you have a better way of making anonymous digital payments?
Such as what in this case? Definitely not power consumption if we’re talking about Monero.
because the buyer pays transaction fees and there is no risk of chargeback so their costs are inherently lower if you pay that way?
Almost nobody else does that. They just want people to use crypto, because they’re closedness obsessed criminals.
you think they’re criminals because they did a thing that’s not a crime?
Oh! You mean crypto currencies, not crypto. I was confused there for a bit. :D
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A commonly known US analog is the Chik-Fil-A restaurant chain. They are proudly Christian and got tons of flak for donating to “traditional family” organizations that spread gay hate and so on.
They stopped, but the owner still personally donates. So every dollar you spend there still fuels those hate groups. It just takes a slightly different path.
So the question isn’t “is the company bad,” it’s “what is your money funding?”
I still call it Bigot Chicken to this day. My family who enjoys it is annoyed by me harping on the company’s general suckitude.
Too bad.
Yeah gee, shame on you for complicating their fast food gluttony with your ethical sensibility!
Funny thing about Chic Fil A is that unlike McDonald’s it’s not a BDS target
So you believe that customers of a company should have a say how the staff uses their wages?
You have that backwards. Customers of a company get to decide whether or not they want to give that company their money for any reason they fucking please
I’d also argue that no one would care if this were some mid-level manager making a donation. This is the owner of a company, not “staff.”
I believe consumers have an ethical obligation to exercise their right to discontinue business with a company when its owners do something unethical.
Legally? No.
Morally? Yes. Customers give their say as to whether or not they want to give their money to some specific company every single time they engage in a business transaction. There is also nothing wrong with telling others to make the same consideration.
Co-founder. Very large contribution. Very unsavoury political party.
On one hand, no, they shouldn’t, on the other hand they’re free to voice their opinion and choose a different service if this is the breaking point.
Problem is, it’s hard to find a good VPN service that doesn’t fuck with alt right chuds and isn’t US based.
Try being in the southern hemisphere and trying to achieve those goals… servers are scarcer here.
Time for me to reassess ivpn, and airvpn I guess