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"'I don’t like that he made this donation' — Mullvad CEO reacts to co-founder’s donation to controversial Swedish populist party" (www.techradar.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] [S] 70 points 2 months ago (31 children)

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.

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  • [–] 45 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (10 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 45 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [+] 28 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [+] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    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".

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago*

    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.

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