MyPillow CEO ordered to pay $5m after election claims court case
The right-wing conspiracy theorist and pillow entrepreneur has become a central figure in the American “election stolen” myth.
An arbitration panel in the United States has ordered Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, to pay $5 million to a software engineer for breach of contract in a dispute over data Lindell says proves China interfered in the 2020 US presidential election.
But Lindell told The Associated Press on Thursday he has no plans to pay and expects the dispute to go to court.
Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from former Republican President Donald Trump.
He launched his “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” to further his theories and – through one of his companies – offered a $5 million reward to anyone who could prove that “packet captures” and other data he released were not valid data of the 2020 elections.
The challenge was part of the “Cyber Symposium” Lindell hosted in August 2021 in South Falls, South Dakota.
Robert Zeidman rose to the challenge with a 15-page report that concluded Lindell’s data “contains no package data of any kind and contains no information related to the November 2020 election.”
A panel of jurors, including attorneys for Lindell, declined to declare Zeidman the winner. So Zeidman filed for arbitration under the contest rules.
After holding a witness hearing in Minneapolis in January, the three arbitrators on Wednesday ordered Lindell to pay Zeidman $5 million.
“He proved that the data provided by Lindell LLC, which reflected the information reflected from the November 2020 election, was unequivocally not a reflection of the November 2020 election data,” the arbitrators wrote. “Failure to pay Mr. Zeidman the $5 million award was a breach of contract, entitling him to reinstatement.”
The arbitrators ordered Lindell to pay within 30 days.
“They clearly saw this as I did — that the data we got at the symposium was not at all what Mr. Lindell said it was,” Zeidman said in a statement Thursday. “The truth is finally out.”
Zeidman’s attorney, Brian Glasser, said the arbitrators’ ruling “marked another key moment in the ongoing evidence that the 2020 election was legal and valid.” He added that Lindell’s claims about the validity of his data had been “conclusively refuted”.
Lindell disputed that, saying he plans to release additional data in the coming weeks or months that will prove his claims of Chinese interference in the 2020 election and confirm what he has previously said.
“It will end up in court,” Lindell said. “I’m not going to pay anything… He hasn’t proven anything.”
Lindell is already the subject of a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems in the District of Columbia, alleging that the MyPillow entrepreneur falsely accused the company of rigging the 2020 presidential election. is also the target of a separate libel lawsuit in Minnesota by another voting machine company, Smartmatic.
Lindell said it was odd that a day after Dominion settled the nearly $800 million defamation lawsuit against Fox News, the arbitrators suggested the ruling was an attempt to get him to end his crusade against electronic voting machines.
“I will spend everything I have to save the country I love,” Lindell said.