Dave Portnoy, the controversial founder of Barstool Sports, says President Donald Trump has offered him a position at the Department of Commerce, reported Bloomberg News on Tuesday.
“I got a call, I don’t know, a couple months ago,” Portnoy revealed in a video posted to tech billionaire Elon Musk's X platform. The problem, he continued, is that "a caveat of joining the government is somebody would have to run Barstool."
Trump did not circle back about the offer after making it, and Portnoy has not as of now accepted any position within the government.
Portnoy added of Musk's current role in the Department of Government Efficiency task force, “He’s doing all this DOGE stuff which I think is good, get rid of government waste, I’m for that. But how do you run Tesla when you’re working on DOGE 24/7?”
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Portnoy, who founded his Barstool media empire in 2004, has been politically outspoken on a number of issues, usually siding with the right. He came out hard in opposition to COVID-19 lockdowns during the pandemic and endorsed Trump for president in 2024. However, he occasionally bucks the GOP line, enraging some of his followers by condemning the Supreme Court's rollback of abortion rights in 2022.
Barstool has faced a number of scandals since its founding, "including allegations of sexual misconduct against Portnoy and fines for violating advertising rules and gambling restrictions," noted the report, as well as a reporter who uttered a racial slur during a livestream.
"Penn Entertainment Inc., a casino and racetrack operator, took full ownership of Barstool Sports in February 2023 in a push into online betting. But the transaction didn’t work out as planned, and in August of that year, Penn announced plans to sell the company back to Portnoy for $1 and record an $850 million loss on the transaction."
Trump has been stocking his administration full of various public figures who supported him in the election, among the most controversial being vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head up the Department of Health and Human Services.