Mike Lindell’s conspiracy-fueled pillow company fights to survive his election obsession
CHASKA — Pillow mogul Mike Lindell calls up former Michigan state senator Patrick Colbeck, who works for something Lindell made up called the Election Crime Bureau, to talk about press strategy.
Lindell tells Colbeck a press release needs to mention his “offense fund,” to which people can give donations so Lindell can keep funding his election fraud battle now that he’s running out of money.
Lindell says he has a tally of U.S. counties that are eschewing voting machines for paper ballots, but he won’t disclose them to the “horrible media.”
Mid-conversation, Lindell starts brainstorming ideas with his marketing person on a new name for his FrankSpeech social media app — he wants the name to convey something about courage.
“Grit’s a good one,” Lindell says.
Lindell summons an employee and asks what MyPillow offers are being advertised on CNN and MSNBC. Colbeck waits on the phone.
Doug Wardlow, a MyPillow lawyer who twice ran for Minnesota attorney general and lost, walks in the office with an update on litigation with a company called MyBooty. Lindell is now having three different conversations at once.
He turns to me and says, “You know all about a Nebraska county going to paper ballots?”
Four conversations.
At MyPillow headquarters in Chaska, Minnesota, religion, politics, pillows and a kinetic CEO fuel a never-ending tornado that Lindell flies around in nearly every minute of every day, selling — always selling — his latest set of sheets, pseudo-Biblical prophecy, election fraud theory, grievance.
So many people are out to get him, he says, and his only defense is to sell more pillows (and bath towels, slippers, coffee, mattress covers and numerous other products).
In the lobby at pillow HQ, there’s a Bible. A devotional. A book called “Jesus Always.” A far-right newspaper called the Epoch Times. A conservative, pro-Israel newspaper called the Jewish Voice.
To find Mike Lindell, listen for the booming voice upstairs, where he’s just returned from several weeks traveling the country. A bevy of women orbit around him, often within earshot in case he bellows out their name with a question or demand.
In the morning, he prepares to do “The Jim Bakker Show” with his chief operating officer and son, Darren Lindell, and his chief marketing officer, Jessica Maskovich. (Three of his four children work for the company.)
“With all the cancellations, we’re expanding into other areas,” Lindell says, explaining why he’s going on the show of a disgraced televangelist.
Walmart, Kohl’s, J.C. Penney, Wayfair, Bed Bath & Beyond and other companies pulled MyPillow products after Lindell’s prominent White House appearance in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, and Lindell has been battling since to save his company, as he fends off lawsuits that could obliterate it. Lindell says he has about 1,300 employees, with more seasonal workers coming for the holidays.
In the main floor call center at headquarters, phones will light up with orders and the ever-present promo codes that will help MyPillow track resulting sales during his media appearances.
Dressed in a light purple dress shirt with a cross necklace peeking out of the collar, Lindell works at a large conference table in his office — never his desk — surrounded by Christian-themed pictures, a closet full of labeled, plastic bins, and an adjoining bathroom and what one presumes is a teal MyPillow towel hanging on the shower door.
Lindell is going over the special offers he’ll promote on Bakker’s show and later, Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. He peppers his employees with questions.
“Can I see Bakker’s drop-in page?”
“What are they paying us on these two?”
“What about slippers?”
Christmas spots will start soon on Fox News, even though Fox won’t let him come on and talk about election fraud anymore, not since voting machine company Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox. Fox settled a separate Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit for nearly $800 million, and Lindell and his company are also being sued by Smartmatic and Dominion for far more than Lindell and his company are worth. Dominion is suing him for $1.3 billion, and Smartmatic for unspecified damages.
A middle-aged brunette woman pops into the office. She does deals with radio hosts across the country.
“We treat every one like it’s our only venue,” Lindell says.
He goes over the questions he’s been given in advance of his appearance on the Bakker show.
Like: “You’ve personally spent millions on the voting machine defamation lawsuits against you and MyPillow. Do you have any regrets?”
“I sure do!” Lindell says, rehearsing his answer. “That I didn’t include ES&S! Ha ha!”
By ES&S, he means Election Systems & Software, an Omaha company that manufactures voting machine equipment.
He says the media thinks he wanted to overturn the 2020 election to get Trump in office — which of course, all evidence indicates he did — but he now claims he would still be sounding the alarm about election security even if Trump had been re-elected.
“This was an attack on our country,” he says. “This isn’t about Donald Trump.” (Just days later, however, he would make another pilgrimage to see Trump at Mar-a-Lago.)
The topic sends him diving into his favorite rabbit hole, lecturing about voting machines — a campaign that has eaten up his personal fortune, and he says commands 80% of his focus. He’s been ordered to pay $5 million to a software engineer who took him up on a challenge to prove him wrong about 2020 election data.
He says he’s spent millions on this quest and his employee-owned company has lost hundreds of millions of dollars amid the fallout, and employees haven’t gotten a dividend in three years.
“We’ve been attacked everywhere from banks to box stores, the media, IRS, FBI,” he says.
The IRS recently filed two liens against his Texas home and land for nearly $9.5 million.
Lindell says the IRS isn’t allowing a deduction related to his effort to offload $10 million worth of oleandrin, a poisonous plant extract and unproven COVID-19 treatment, to other countries during the pandemic.
Lindell bought a stake in a company producing the dubious treatment, but scientists said it was possibly dangerous and his shipments kept getting stymied by the government until the oleandrin expired. He claimed it as a loss on his personal taxes.
He’s still enraged by a Dominion lawyer’s suggestion that he’s spinning election conspiracies to pump up MyPillow sales.
“If it was a marketing thing, I’m smart enough to say we failed,” Lindell says.
He now claims Republicans are also covering up problems with voting machines.
“Republicans were stealing elections,” Lindell says. “Our biggest blockers have been the Republicans to get rid of these voting machines.”
Democrats have also publicly worried about their vulnerabilities, too. Lindell notes that U.S. Sen Amy Klobuchar warned about the vulnerability of electronic voting machines in the HBO documentary “Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections,” which arrived about the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic. The election experts in the film say that the answer is paper ballots counted by computers, so the vote can be audited. Lindell wants paper ballots to be hand counted.
While election experts say no voting system is invulnerable, a coalition of federal cybersecurity and election officials concluded the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.” Hand counting paper ballots is also slower, less accurate and more vulnerable to the very fraud Lindell claims to be fighting.
Lindell switches from preparing for the Bakker show to talking about his conservative social media platforms — where you can watch Lindell TV 24/7. He’s poured millions into creating his own mouthpieces; he says he put $12 million into his nightly Lindell TV show, which has run for two years on his own servers. He says about 4 million people watch FrankSpeech — conservative broadcast network and video platform — per month.
He says he’s persuaded about 200 counties to “go machine free” and hopes to get them all on board next year.
“I just get fired up,” he says.
Then he turns to his marketing guru and says, “Tell me what you want me to wear.”
While Maskovich gets up and grabs the options, Lindell calls for his controller, Michael Thomas.
“So what do we got for money?”
Then he starts a separate phone conversation with his procurement director Bob Sohns, saying, “Bob Bob Bob Bob Bob.”
They’re debating which bills to pay that day.
“They both need to be paid or?” Lindell says. “175 based on last week.”
“Do we need to post-date it so it looks good?”
“Go ahead and mail that one.”
“Pay the 86. Tell ‘em to send a truck immediately … don’t say anything about 175.”
“How much do we have at Lindell Management? Does that include Bannon?”
“Pull those loans.”
Lindell opts to wear the white shirt and blue jacket, then goes into the bathroom to change and starts talking on the phone again.
Wardlow walks in the office looking for Lindell.
Lindell walks out with his dress shirt untucked, talking on the phone.
No one else seems to be talking about fraud in the recent election, but Lindell will talk all day about it: “It was horrific… in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Dallas,” he says.
‘He was a mile-a-minute guy’
This is how it goes all day long.
Lindell estimates he’s in Texas about half the time, and Minnesota about one-third of the time, so when he’s at headquarters, it’s a machine gun of questions, answers, demands, commentary, wardrobe changes, makeup, cameras and lights.
His employees try to get questions answered, documents signed, decisions made, but he’s in motion, jabbering on while often scrawling madly on paper.
Former Chaska Mayor Bob Roepke served on the MyPillow board of directors for several years before leaving in January 2021 after Lindell became enamored with Trump.
“He was really engaged with that relationship,” Roepke says. “We just weren’t aligned in terms of national leadership.”
Roepke decided it was best to resign, but says Lindell is a true entrepreneur who touched every component of his business.
“He was a mile-a-minute guy, going and going and going and then going some more. I’m not sure when he ever rested.”
Lindell helped friends from his past — his journey from crackhead to pillow salesman is legendary — and was committed to his employees, Roepke says.
“We talked about using automation to reduce the workforce, but he didn’t want any part of that,” he says. “It was really important for him to employ those who had challenges in their life.”
Lindell has long followed his instincts, beliefs and sometimes even literal dreams, which took his company far, but now have put it on the line. It’s a privately held company, which means MyPillow’s financial health is opaque. Lindell is the primary stockholder.
‘It was a Hardee’s, not a Wendy’s’
Lindell is hawking products on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast — which one study found had more inaccuracies than any other podcast.
Lindell heads down the hallway to the other end of the building where he’s converted an office into a makeshift TV studio. He sits at a desk in front of bookcases stuffed with bright towels, furry slippers and an array of small, colorful children’s pillows with cartoonish Bible scenes.
On the video monitor, Bannon is talking about George Floyd, then goes to break and tells Lindell, “You got a hot three (minutes).”
While waiting for his segment to begin, Lindell asks for a mirror and dabs makeup onto his face and spritzes on some hairspray.
Since getting dropped by multiple retailers, Lindell says, Bannon regularly has him on the podcast to do “basically a commercial” like those he used to do on mainstream stations to launch his pillows in 2014.
Bannon was charged with duping thousands of people who donated money to “build the wall” on America’s southern border; much of the money was misspent but Trump pardoned him on his way out of office. He has since been recharged and has pleaded innocent.
“They’re tryin’ to bankrupt Mike Lindell,” Bannon says in the leadup to the segment. When they go after Lindell, they’re going after you, Bannon tells his audience.
This kind of manichean, existentialist politics of survival sells — and apparently sells pillows, too.
“Mike Lindell, how do we keep MyPillow open?” Bannon asks to start the hot three minutes.
Yes, Lindell says, the FBI attacked my call center reps but you can buy some “last chance flash sale slippers” for $39.98 or a six-pack of towels for $29.98. Or perhaps sleepwear, quilts, comforters and don’t forget the promo code, the Bannonesque WAR ROOM.
(Lindell later clarifies that it’s not the FBI, but the Minnesota Department of Revenue that is auditing his call center contract employees who work from home.)
“Thanks for working on the plan,” Lindell tells Bannon before signing off.
The plan to secure elections, that is. He has one. It involves a wireless device that monitors polling places to see if voting machines are connected to the internet.
On the podcast again in the afternoon, Bannon praises Lindell for risking his company to investigate election fraud, mentioning the FBI seizing his cell phone while he was in a Wendy’s drive-thru about a year ago.
“Fact check: It was a Hardee’s not a Wendy’s,” Lindell says.
Though today Lindell did have a KFC two-piece meal for lunch.
Feeling the love from a fallen televangelist
In less than half an hour, Lindell is back in the studio to do “The Jim Bakker Show.” Four employees scurry around trying to find a suitable pillow for the segment. It has to be the perfect pillow for the moment. The right size and fluffiness.
Once found, Lindell plumps it up, turns it, preps it, fluffs it until it’s just right and then cradles it in his hands and puts on his trademark salesman smile for the camera, fidgeting with his hands while waiting for the green light.
Bakker is a former televangelist who rode the gospel to fame in the 1970s and 1980s with his “Praise the Lord” show, propelled in part by his glitzy, heavily made-up blonde wife Tammy Faye, who was born in International Falls, Minnesota.
It all came crashing down in the late 1980s amid a sex scandal, criminal indictments and news of Rolls Royces, a jet and an air-conditioned doghouse. He and Tammy Faye broke up, and she died a gay icon for her compassion for LGBT people and HIV patients during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
Jim Bakker served five years in prison for fraud, and now he’s back with a revived TV show and empire — syndicated on Christian television networks — that looks very much like the old one, complete with a new heavily made-up blonde wife named Lori (who bears a striking resemblance to Tammy Faye), a Christian resort in the Ozarks, and several ways to give money money money, such as buying a bucket of end-times survival food.
Lindell and the Bakkers chat by video briefly before the show begins.
The Bakkers ask about American Express, which Lindell says reduced MyPillow’s credit line from a million dollars to $100,000 in September. He says his company “had to use debit cards” to get by until they got a new card.
“Demonic,” Lori says.
Jim Bakker wants to know why they don’t like Lindell.
“Because I want to get rid of the electronic voting machines,” Lindell says.
“The bottom line is they don’t want me talking anymore,” he says.
“They hate you as much as Trump I guess,” Jim Bakker says.
During the on-air segment, the Bakkers are adoring fans, repeatedly saying, “We love you.”
Jim Bakker commiserates, saying “the left” has been trying to take him off TV for years. Then he claims he lost $20 million through lawsuits.
Lindell is undeterred.
“They’ll never stop my voice,” he says, even though, as he acknowledges to Bakker, “My money is gone.”
“I’ll keep going,” he says.
‘I don’t think he’s demanding; he’s particular’
Lindell told the Bakkers his employees have been great throughout the storm. And also, “I treat every employee like my only employee.”
But clearly he can be abrupt and demanding and rarely says “thank you” or “please.”
“I don’t think he’s demanding — he’s particular,” says Jennifer Pauly Hunter, vice president of tech services for MyPillow.
He wants to know the price of the promoted products down to the penny, and debates whether it’s the right price point. He needs the pillow to look just right on TV. He needs the perfect outfit for the interview.
Pauly Hunter has worked for MyPillow for over 11 years. Her sister is an office manager there. Her mom works in shipping. Her cousin is tech coordinator for the warehouse. Her other sister and a cousin also used to work there.
“It’s a family thing,” she says.
She started as a temp in the call center to make gas money while she was going to school to be a health care administrator.
Technology always came easy to her and Lindell spotted her talent, so she took classes and now has an office adjacent to the call center, where operators take calls 24/7 in row after row of cubicles, including weekends and holidays.
If you’re loyal and want to learn a skill, Lindell will support you in that, Pauly Hunter says.
If you have a death in the family — like when her uncle died — he’ll send flowers and cards.
Sometimes she wears a MyPillow hoodie in public, and people will make comments like, “You work for a crazy man.”
“Sometimes it hurts my feelings,” Pauly Hunter says. “Because I know how passionate and how much Mike cares.”
The political stuff is “one little fraction of his life,” she says.
Sarah Cronin, Lindell’s chief of staff, is a Chaska High School graduate who started out stuffing pillows, and now has a spacious corner office that once belonged to a bank president.
“It’s always exciting to come to work,” she says.
She’s filling in for Lindell’s assistant today, a job that includes manning his phone, heeding his demand that every call and text be answered immediately. She gladly offloads the phone to Pauly Hunter mid-morning.
Lindell jokes that every journalist in the country has his cell phone number, as well as 500 employees (no joke).
‘Tell me another problem’
Back at the conference table, Lindell is on the phone with his controller, Thomas.
An employee walks in and Lindell asks about numbers. She says they’re “up 15,000.” In other words, MyPillow sales were up $15,000 for the day compared to the same moment in time the day before.
Lindell says each afternoon they should be at about a half-million dollars in sales.
“Bannon’s at 29-five,” an employee tells him. That means their commercials had generated $2,950 by that point.
“So is he happy?” Lindell asks.
“He wants to do $100,000 today,” the employee says. In other words, Bannon wants MyPillow to make $100,000 today, not knowing the company normally makes about five times that, Lindell says.
Wardlow quietly walks in the office again. He tells Lindell they need to sign the Deutsche Bank settlement and talk about the MyBooty lawsuit.
Lindell says he’s meeting with all the attorneys general in the nation. (A meeting with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison seems doubtful.)
After some discussion, they settle on a new name for his social media app: Courage.
“What else you got?” Lindell says. “Tell me another problem.”
They talk about FrankTV and some coming “big-name hosts” he won’t disclose — although Roger Stone’s name comes up. (Also convicted of crimes and pardoned by Trump.)
As Lindell wraps up the call, he booms joyously, “What was that movie? Get back out there and sell sell sell!”
(It’s “Trading Places,” a movie about how you can easily lose it all.)
‘It’s hard to have lawyers who don’t believe in what you’re doing’
Lindell returns from an interview about LifeWave phototherapy patches — which several employees are wearing and swear cures migraines and other ailments.
Pauly Hunter goes over Lindell’s “to do” list.
“You still need to call Mar-a-Lago and your lawyer,” she says. He’s going to Florida to meet with the CEO of PublicSquare — a right-wing business digital directory — and meet with Trump at his Palm Beach resort.
He calls an attorney interested in representing him in lawsuits with voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion.
“It’s hard to have lawyers who don’t believe in what you’re doing,” Lindell tells the lawyer.
He’s fine with the retainer. He asks if they have a plane so they can meet up while he’s traveling.
“Something has to be filed Monday with Smartmatic,” Lindell says.
He later says he and MyPillow decided to part ways with the attorneys because the bills were $2 million per month. They’re going with a new firm that is “10 times cheaper,” he says.
The Minneapolis and Washington law firms told federal judges they’re owed millions in legal fees.
“I have a pickup truck and two houses: in Texas and Florida,” Lindell says.
But he still leases a private jet, as he has for years.
And now he’s off and talking about the various places that are moving away from voting machines. He claims he gets the most pushback from Republicans, which dovetails with one of his messages of the day, that he’s not actually the partisan Republican he’s been made out to be.
“I was neither party before all this happened,” he says.
If voting machines can be manipulated, who’s doing the manipulating? He’s not sure, but thinks the CIA is involved, and the Deep State, and the “uniparty.”
His wife, Kendra, calls. After eight years of dating, they married last spring.
“I’m really in the mood for California crust (pizza),” he tells her.
That night, Lindell does an online-streamed show, where he talks about election security and takes calls — during which he’s occasionally distracted by his phone, from which he says he runs his business, eschewing a computer.
Brian in Minnesota wants to know if he ever got his cell phone back from the FBI. No he didn’t, he says, and there are pictures of his grandkids on it.
“They’re turning up the heat on MyPillow because they know our plan is gonna work,” he says.
He leaves the office at 7 p.m., and says he’ll spend the next four hours at home reading 433 emails and 73 texts before returning at 8 a.m. tomorrow.
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on Facebook and Twitter.
Screen grab from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's Facebook
Screen grab Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's Facebook