The once-ubiquitous MyPillow commercials that flooded the airwaves of Fox News and other cable television stations have all but disappeared over the past few weeks amid owner Mike Lindell’s ongoing financial problems, the linen company founder confirmed on Wednesday.
In a conversation with The Daily Beast, Lindell noted that the month-long TV break would end next week, adding that “you’re gonna see us everywhere again” and “it’s gonna be awesome.”
At the same time, the MyPillow CEO acknowledged that his company has faced increasing headwinds in recent months, which helped lead to the delay in getting back on television.
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The MAGA pillow magnate, who said earlier this month that he has “no money” due to his quixotic quest to prove the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, admitted in recent days that he paused his ads due to a lack of product to sell and lenders cutting him off.
The latest blow to his already struggling company comes at a perilous time for the pro-Trump conspiracy theorist. With Lindell and MyPillow currently facing billion-dollar defamation lawsuits from voting software firms Dominion and Smartmatic over his election lies, his legal team dumped him last week because he owes them millions of dollars that he cannot pay.
During Friday’s broadcast of his online show The Lindell Report, Lindell confessed that American Express had recently reduced his million-dollar credit line to $100,000, placing his company in an immediate bind when it came to paying vendors.
“And all the stuff overseas is late coming, so we’re waiting for our stuff that goes on TV,” he said. “That’s why you’re not seeing MyPillow on TV right now.”
Because “these ships get hung up,” he added, items he counted on arriving in September have been delayed until October, so he “can’t run ads on TV” to sell the merchandise. He further grumbled about his compiling legal costs and the unwillingness of banks to lend to him or his company.
“I can’t go get the money,” he declared.
On Monday’s broadcast of The Lindell Report, Lindell reassured his online viewers that MyPillow would soon be back on television.
“We’re gonna be doing a big, big ad campaign starting next Monday on the networks,” he asserted. “You haven’t seen us on TV for the longest stretch—for about three weeks now. We took a break during all of this time.”
Reiterating that the reason why MyPillow went dark on TV was due to a “delay” in receiving its latest seasonal products, Lindell also blamed the mainstream media for spooking his vendors and American Express into reducing his credit lines.
According to Lindell, the press coverage in June over his company auctioning off surplus factory machinery and equipment led to concerns that MyPillow was going out of business. Besides causing American Express to slash Lindell’s credit limit by 90 percent, it also prompted other companies to reduce MyPillow’s existing lines of credit by half.
Lindell told The Daily Beast all the recent delays “came at once,” and that part of the reason why he wasn’t getting the new ad campaign out until late October was due to spending so much time dealing with his existing vendors.
“They say, ‘we’re nervous about what we hear in the media.’ There’s been some of that, but that goes all the way back to June,” Lindell proclaimed. “And then American Express actually compounded that a little bit. So every time that happens, I gotta sit down and call my vendors and I said I’ll send them our books and I gotta get them confident again because they get scared and it takes a lot of my time to sit there.”
He added: “The one product was two or three weeks delayed by ship. And then we also had a delay for making the commercials. I’m the guy that’s gotta be there. I gotta be there for commercials. I had a two-week delay, just dealing with everything that’s going on. So I’ve been having my playoff production company going, ‘Hey, we need you to get here and make these commercials or they’re not going to be ready in time.’”
Lindell also told The Daily Beast that he has secured the services of a more affordable law firm, claiming that his previous legal team was costing him at least $2 million a month, adding: “nobody can afford that.”
Yet, despite his claims that MyPillow has lost $250 million in revenue and the fact that he’s personally dumped tens of millions of dollars into his efforts to prove widespread voter fraud, Lindell has vowed to keep the fight going and to never settle his massive lawsuits.
In his mind, this is all part of a grand conspiracy to keep him from revealing the truth about President Joe Biden’s “rigged” electoral victory. And part of that plan involved Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch shelling out $787.5 million to settle Dominion’s defamation lawsuit.
“Well, the Murdochs were in on it, Steve. I'm a firm believer. I believe they were in on it. You know? I’ll say it again. I mean, that's the only reason you would ever make a dirty deal like that,” Lindell told fellow election denier Steve Bannon last week. “And I said, all these other cases are lawfare that want to push out past the 2024 election to try and distract and run people out of money so we quit talking about our election platforms. I will never stop talking.”
At the same time, the linen salesman continues to devote much of his energy to hatching new schemes to “secure” future elections. This includes a wacky plan that he unveiled this summer that supposedly involves using wireless monitoring devices to catch hackers trying to rig voting machines at polling locations.
Unlike years gone by, which featured Lindell personally fronting the costs of these efforts, the pillow chief is now asking his fans to chip into the “Lindell Offense Fund” to help bring his latest “Stop the Steal” vision to fruition.
