Mike Lindell is asking Minnesota voters to put him in charge of a state government that manages a budget in the tens of billions of dollars.

At the same time, a line of creditors is chasing his company in court for more than $25 million in unpaid bills.

That's not an attack ad. It's the finding of a Star Tribune investigation published July 27, 2026, built on court records and Lindell's own sworn depositions.

The judgments

Here's what has piled up against MyPillow:

• $15.4 million — a default judgment won in December by ACI International, the Los Angeles footwear maker that supplied MyPillow's slippers. MyPillow never responded to the lawsuit. ACI then put a levy on MyPillow's Amazon account, and MyPillow told the court that if the levy isn't lifted, the company "could go out of business."
• $8.8 million — a default judgment for FedEx, granted by a federal judge in Tennessee in August. Lindell is personally on the hook for $2.7 million of it. MyPillow didn't respond to that suit either.
• $2.3 million more — spread across at least six additional court judgments in the past 18 months, including one won by an arm of UPS and one by St. Cloud-based Spee-Dee Delivery. Most were also default judgments.
• $777,730 — what a Hennepin County judge ordered MyPillow to pay DHL after it stopped paying its shipping bills. That one, at least, has been paid off.

A "default judgment" means the company didn't even show up to defend itself.

What FedEx says he told them

The FedEx case is worth reading closely, because it's not just about a late invoice. FedEx accused Lindell of fraud — of misrepresenting MyPillow's ability to pay.

In a court filing, the company laid out the pattern: "A continuing theme in Lindell's communications with FedEx was that funds were available, on the way, and that FedEx would receive payment at any moment."

According to the suit, the promised money kept changing shape:

• First, Lindell said a stock offering by his other company, FrankSpeech, would raise $20 million to cover the bills. He later admitted in a filing that the offering "was not as successful as others promised me," and that he never got any money from it.
• Then he said loans would cover it. That didn't happen either.
• Then he said he'd pay from a "high-end stock option opportunity" involving shares in Elon Musk's SpaceX. "This too never happened," FedEx says.

Lindell maintains the promises were made in good faith.

Think about what that means for a governor's race. The core job of a governor is to make a budget work — to say what the state can afford and then be right about it. Lindell's own creditors are alleging he spent two years telling them money was on the way that never came.

Nearly a billion dollars, because he lied about the election

The unpaid vendors are only part of it. Lindell also faces court rulings tied to the conspiracy theories he spread about the 2020 election that could cost him hundreds of millions of dollars.

• A federal judge in Minnesota ruled last September that Lindell and MyPillow defamed Smartmatic, the voting technology company Lindell claimed had rigged machines. Judge Jeffrey Bryan wrote that "Smartmatic offers undisputed evidence that MyPillow was aware of Lindell's conduct," and that members of MyPillow's board admitted they knew about his defamatory statements. Smartmatic is seeking nine-figure damages.
• A Colorado jury last year found Lindell and FrankSpeech defamed Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems employee, and awarded him $2.3 million. Lindell has appealed.

He caught one break: Dominion, which had sued Lindell and MyPillow for $1.3 billion, was sold last year to a Republican election official and renamed Liberty Vote. In June, it dropped the suit.

Lindell says he now plans to seek dismissal of the Smartmatic case based on documents Trump recently released, insisting they'll prove "Mike was right all along, 100 percent right." As the Star Tribune notes, no independent review of the 2020 election has found widespread voting machine fraud — a conclusion also reached by Trump's own first-term attorney general, William Barr.

Who actually paid for this

Here's the part that gets lost when this is treated as a colorful story about a TV pitchman.

MyPillow lost tens of millions of dollars after 2022. By 2024 it was so short on cash it sought money from what the Star Tribune describes as the business equivalent of payday lenders. Creditors got stiffed. Workers got laid off. And MyPillow's employee stockholders — regular people who owned a piece of the company — likely took a hit.

Lindell owned just over half of MyPillow as of 2024; employees mostly owned the rest.

He was warned. Jim Furlong, a longtime friend and MyPillow's former president, said in a 2024 deposition that when Lindell went public backing Trump in 2016, "I thought it was a terrible mistake." He called it "the beginning of the downfall of MyPillow." Furlong said that when he and the company's attorney raised concerns at a board meeting, "Mike said he was going to do it, and if we didn't like it, that was just too bad."

Lindell himself put it plainly in a 2024 deposition: "I burned through money because I didn't care — I don't have a company — if we don't save our country."

He burned through other people's money too.

Even his own party is saying it

You don't have to be a Democrat to be alarmed here. The Republican Party of Minnesota put out a statement saying Lindell has "serious financial baggage," and warned his candidacy could hand Democrats not just the governor's office but full control of the Legislature.

Trump endorsed him anyway — over House Speaker Lisa Demuth and over Kendall Qualls, who actually won the state Republican endorsement in May.

Asked about all of it, Lindell told the Star Tribune: "My company is still standing and we're in great shape." Then he ended the interview before answering whether MyPillow has paid its creditors anything.

The bottom line

The Republican primary for Minnesota governor is August 11.

A man whose company has ignored lawsuits until judges ruled against it by default, who told a shipping company money was coming from three different sources that never materialized, and who owes potentially hundreds of millions because he wouldn't stop lying about an election — is asking for the keys to Minnesota's government.

His own state party says he has serious financial baggage. His own former company president says he was warned. His own creditors are still waiting.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Mike Hughlett for The Minnesota Star Tribune. Photo: Anthony Soufflé/The Minnesota Star Tribune.