OpenAI buying Proton Mail would be the corporate equivalent of lighting yourself on fire to stay warm.
Uncategorized
3
Posts
2
Posters
42
Views
-
OpenAI buying Proton Mail would be the corporate equivalent of lighting yourself on fire to stay warm.
Proton’s entire pitch is “we don’t track you, we don’t mine you, we don’t peek at your inbox,” and OpenAI is… well… the company everyone already accuses of being a data-vacuum with a GPU addiction. The moment OpenAI’s name appears on the cap table, half of Proton’s users will flee so fast they’ll leave Swiss-shaped smoke trails behind them.
And for what? Proton’s encrypted data is unusable, the business is low-margin, and the regulatory blowback would make the EU reopen GDPR just to add a special chapter titled “Absolutely Not.”
Even the synergy story fails. OpenAI can’t mine Proton’s data without detonating the brand, and if they don’t mine it, all they’ve bought is a Swiss ISP with a fanbase that already hates them.
Culture clash? Terminal. Proton’s engineers would quit before the ink dries and spin up “Proton-but-even-more-Proton” within six months.
Competing with Google by buying Proton makes as much sense as Nvidia competing with Netflix by buying NordVPN. Wrong layer of the stack, wrong economics, wrong audience, wrong everything.
From a fundamentals standpoint, the risk is high, the reward is microscopic, and the strategic logic is basically “what if we spent a fortune to make everyone distrust us more?”
If OpenAI wants a privacy narrative, they should build auditable privacy features, not acquire a brand whose entire identity depends on OpenAI never coming within fifty kilometres of it.
Buying Proton Mail wouldn’t be bold. It would be suicide.
-
OpenAI buying Proton Mail would be the corporate equivalent of lighting yourself on fire to stay warm.
Proton’s entire pitch is “we don’t track you, we don’t mine you, we don’t peek at your inbox,” and OpenAI is… well… the company everyone already accuses of being a data-vacuum with a GPU addiction. The moment OpenAI’s name appears on the cap table, half of Proton’s users will flee so fast they’ll leave Swiss-shaped smoke trails behind them.
And for what? Proton’s encrypted data is unusable, the business is low-margin, and the regulatory blowback would make the EU reopen GDPR just to add a special chapter titled “Absolutely Not.”
Even the synergy story fails. OpenAI can’t mine Proton’s data without detonating the brand, and if they don’t mine it, all they’ve bought is a Swiss ISP with a fanbase that already hates them.
Culture clash? Terminal. Proton’s engineers would quit before the ink dries and spin up “Proton-but-even-more-Proton” within six months.
Competing with Google by buying Proton makes as much sense as Nvidia competing with Netflix by buying NordVPN. Wrong layer of the stack, wrong economics, wrong audience, wrong everything.
From a fundamentals standpoint, the risk is high, the reward is microscopic, and the strategic logic is basically “what if we spent a fortune to make everyone distrust us more?”
If OpenAI wants a privacy narrative, they should build auditable privacy features, not acquire a brand whose entire identity depends on OpenAI never coming within fifty kilometres of it.
Buying Proton Mail wouldn’t be bold. It would be suicide.@atomicpoet Great analysis. I don't know who Dan Sanchez is but he has obviously thought very long and hard about the problem and decided that you can't be a trillion-dollar company without owning a webmail service.
And that's it. That's his proposition. Never mind all the impossible culture-clash problems you've just mentioned, just "buy Proton" and then they'll be the new Google.
-
@atomicpoet Great analysis. I don't know who Dan Sanchez is but he has obviously thought very long and hard about the problem and decided that you can't be a trillion-dollar company without owning a webmail service.
And that's it. That's his proposition. Never mind all the impossible culture-clash problems you've just mentioned, just "buy Proton" and then they'll be the new Google.
@losttourist This post got him on r/LinkedInLunatics. Because, yeah, it’s such a wild take.
