Their business isn’t put at risk, we are long past the time when there were Edward Snowdens. Any intelligence agency involvement would be highly localized, highly specialized, and highly classified. You’d have more of a chance of a CEO of such a service outing themselves by sucking up to Donald Trump than getting ratted out. There are plenty of services that at one point or another did price themselves as being the privacy option that were later exposed, usually because they came from more well known brands that just happened to run into the situations that would expose them due to market presence.

A CEO is a good indication of the internal company culture at the top. He may be as much of a libertarian as Elon Musk is a “free speech absolutist”, I’m not going to assume the best case scenario because I am not invested in proton and don’t have an innate sunk cost fallacy. I agree with that comment, “it seems like he might just be bootlicking whoever is in power as appeasement”.