Should you took a time machine again precisely ten years, to December 4, 2015, you’d land in a world the place Adele’s “25” was shattering gross sales data, “Star Wars: The Drive Awakens” dominated each billboard, and cable information was buzzing nonstop concerning the upcoming presidential primaries. Flip on CNN or Fox Information to catch the newest ballot updates, await the industrial break, and I can virtually assure the primary face you’d see was Mike Lindell’s.
A decade in the past, Mike Lindell was a extensively admired and revered enterprise tycoon. The epitome of the American dream. An inspirational rags-to-riches story. A person who overcame drug habit after which launched what grew to become a extremely profitable firm, My Pillow. He was all over the place. His upbeat late-night infomercials had been so ubiquitous that you would barely watch cable tv after 9 p.m. with out seeing Lindell enthusiastically pitching his pillows.
On the time, MyPillow was producing roughly $110 million per 12 months in gross income. Based mostly on comparable companies, the corporate simply may have been valued between $300 million and $500 million had it ever pursued acquisition presents. As such, in late 2015, we conservatively estimated Mike’s web price to be $100 million. One may argue that his web price, based mostly on absolutely the highest potential enterprise worth of My Pillow, would have pushed his web price into the $200-300 million vary.
Quick ahead to the current, and sadly, all of the pillows on the earth would not soften Mike Lindell’s monetary fall…
(Picture by Joel Koyama/Star Tribune through Getty Photos)
From Crack to Pillows
Lengthy earlier than Mike Lindell grew to become the grinning mustachioed salesman in late-night infomercials, he spent years drifting between entrepreneurial ambition and self-destruction. Raised in Minnesota, he struggled with insomnia and persistent ache lengthy earlier than medicine entered the image. As a younger man, he survived a collection of near-death experiences, together with a violent automotive accident, a failed skydive, and a motorbike crash. By his twenties, he owned bars within the Minneapolis suburbs, a way of life that accelerated what would change into a decades-long habit to cocaine and, later, crack.
Regardless of the chaos, Lindell was all the time chasing enterprise concepts. In 2003, throughout one of many extra erratic durations of his habit, he grew to become fixated on the notion that he may invent the right pillow. For years he had been pulling aside foam pillows by hand, reshaping them till they briefly match his wants earlier than collapsing in a single day. One morning, after one other sleepless night time, he sat at his kitchen desk scribbling “MyPillow” throughout sheets of paper, sketching logos with manic conviction. The concept caught.
Lindell spent the following a number of years experimenting with foam blends on his deck, tearing hundreds of items of fabric by hand with assist from his sons. He ultimately discovered an previous hammermill, a rusted agricultural machine used for grinding corn, and rebuilt it to shred foam constantly. With that breakthrough, he produced a couple of hundred pillows and tried to promote them to native retailers. Each main chain turned him down.
Determined, he borrowed $12,000 to lease a mall kiosk through the 2004 vacation season. The kiosk failed spectacularly. He had priced the pillow too low, was dropping cash on each sale, and the product did not match customary pillowcases. He borrowed extra money from the dwindling pool of buddies keen to assist him, mortgaged his home repeatedly, and returned to counting playing cards at casinos after hours to maintain the enterprise alive. Each time the strain mounted, he relapsed.
The turning level got here after the kiosk shut down. A buyer known as to say the pillow had modified his life and inspired Lindell to exhibit on the Minneapolis Dwelling + Backyard Present. Lindell introduced 300 pillows to the occasion and offered each one. That success led to extra exhibits, extra festivals, and an exhausting cross-country grind wherein Lindell and a small crew traveled from state to state promoting pillows out of vehicles. His marriage collapsed. He misplaced his home. He was nonetheless utilizing medicine closely.
In 2009, after a 19-day crack binge, his supplier refused to promote to him till he acquired clear. That intervention lastly broke the cycle. Inside days of quitting medicine, Lindell borrowed $30,000 from the homeowners of a mulching firm, caught up on money owed to his foam and stitching suppliers, and threw himself again into rebuilding MyPillow.
The following breakthrough got here in 2011, when a characteristic article within the Minneapolis Star Tribune triggered a flood of on-line orders. Lindell realized that his private story resonated with individuals. He started designing newspaper advertisements modeled after the article and shortly dedicated to the technique that will outline the corporate: an infomercial.
The primary half-hour MyPillow infomercial aired at 3 a.m. on October 7, 2011. Lindell purchased each off-hour timeslot he may afford, betting the corporate’s survival on late-night insomniacs. The gamble labored. Inside months, MyPillow grew from 50 to 500 staff and approached $100 million in gross sales. Offers with Telebrands, Mattress Bathtub & Past, Walmart, QVC, and different main retailers adopted. Had he sought acquisition presents, MyPillow simply may have fetched $300 million, and possibly nearer to $500 million, which even after taxes would have made Mike Lindell a centimillionaire. For a short, dazzling stretch, Lindell had lastly constructed the empire he had chased for many years.
The Downfall
The collapse of Mike Lindell’s fortune and enterprise empire was not sudden. It unfolded in layers, every amplifying the harm from the final.
The turning level started when Lindell redirected his time, cash, and company infrastructure towards disproven claims of widespread fraud within the 2020 presidential election. What began as political advocacy rapidly grew to become an all-consuming monetary black gap. Lindell poured tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} of his private wealth into failed investigations, fringe conferences, documentary-style movies, and the launch of Frank Social, a social media platform that reportedly burned via roughly $1 million per 30 days. On the top of this spending spree, he additionally issued a public $5 million problem promising to pay anybody who may disprove his so-called election “packet knowledge.” A expertise skilled did precisely that, and after an arbitration panel sided in opposition to Lindell, he was legally compelled to pay.
These efforts triggered huge lawsuits from Dominion Voting Methods and Smartmatic, every accusing him of defamation and in search of staggering monetary damages. The price of defending these instances proved ruinous. A number of regulation companies withdrew from representing Lindell and MyPillow after he fell hundreds of thousands of {dollars} behind on authorized charges.
In October 2023, a regulation agency known as Parker Daniels Kibort and Lewin & Lewin filed paperwork in each Minnesota and Washington, D.C., in search of permission to drop him as a shopper. Based on a authorized submitting, the legal professionals had been seeking to be excused from the case because of lack of cost. Mike had reportedly did not pay “hundreds of thousands of {dollars}” in authorized charges. The legal professionals had been representing Mike and My Pillow in defamation lawsuits introduced by voting machine firms Dominion Voting Methods and Smartmatic. Dominion alone sued Mike for $1.3 billion in damages.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Photos
This is the submitting from Mike’s soon-to-be-former legal professionals:
“On October 2, 2023, Parker Daniels Kibort and Lewin & Lewin was knowledgeable by Defendants [Lindell and My Pillow] that they don’t seem to be in a position to get caught up with or make any cost on the big quantity they owe in arrears nor pay for anyplace close to the estimated expense of constant to defend in opposition to the lawsuits going ahead, together with both the authorized charges or litigation prices…“
The regulation agency additionally claimed that persevering with to symbolize Lindell and My Pillow “may threaten the very existence of the agency.“
A day after that submitting was made, Mike appeared on Steve Bannon’s “Battle Room” and gave additional particulars about his present state of affairs:
“I am unable to pay the legal professionals. We will not pay. There is not any cash left to pay them. I do not know the place that leaves us.“
In a separate interview with NBC, Mike elaborated:
“We have misplaced all the pieces. Each dime. All of it’s gone.”
He later acknowledged that he had spent between $25 and $50 million of his personal cash on election-related ventures, leaving him with out reserves simply because the lawsuits intensified. Courtroom-ordered sanctions, arbitration rulings, and IRS disputes added new layers of monetary obligation. He has described a state of affairs wherein he owns little greater than two properties and a truck, all of which he has tried to liquidate to cowl money owed. Even modest penalty funds have change into unmanageable. In emotional court docket testimony, he has acknowledged that he’s unable to borrow cash, unable to pay legal professionals, and unable to satisfy cost plans he beforehand agreed to.
Exacerbating his monetary issues was the utter obliteration of MyPillow’s enterprise. The corporate had as soon as been a staple at main retailers like Walmart, Mattress Bathtub & Past, QVC, and the Dwelling Buying Channel. One after the other, these companions severed ties. Promoting channels backed away as properly. Lindell has claimed that MyPillow’s annual income, which as soon as topped $110 million, collapsed to roughly $5 million — a 95% drop that compelled layoffs, warehouse closures, and a drastic scaling-back of operations.
On account of all these components, we diminished Mike Lindell’s web price to ZERO. And relying on the end result of the defamation instances, zero may merely be the place to begin.
