Mike Lindell Doesn’t Know What to Do With 2 Million Masks MyPillow Produced: ‘No One Wants the Things Anymore’

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell pivoted his business toward the beginning of the pandemic to help with the face mask making effort. Now he has about two million masks that he thinks he “ought to just burn.”

Lindell’s comments came during a recent Daily Beast interview in which he lamented that he “can’t give them away” because “no one wants the things anymore.”

He said he has tried to give them away, and at this point, “anyone can have them now.”

“We gave away five million masks to the public, free across this country, and it cost about $4.8 million to make them,” he said. “Anyone can have them now. I don’t care.”

He first announced the charitable effort to send masks to frontline workers in March at a press event with former President Donald Trump. However, his plan hit a roadblock when his cloth masks failed to meet FDA standards.

“We were only gonna donate to VA hospitals, nursing homes, but the FDA and [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] made it that you could only use certain masks from certain factories,” Lindell said.

According to the report, Lindell dipped into his personal funds to outsource N95 and KN95 masks. Those masks were donated or sold at cost to “municipalities, police departments, nursing homes, overseas ministries, the state of Minnesota, and the Arizona Navajo Nation.”

The operation personally cost him about $7 million and much of the machinery and space purchased for the endeavor has not been converted back to standard MyPillow operations.

“I don’t know how to convert it back—you can’t just cut wires and stuff,” he said. “Will we need it again? Probably not. We’ll probably eventually have to sell the sewing machines. We bought hundreds.”

Lindell also said in the interview that he stopped the mask production after deciding they were ineffective against preventing the virus from spreading (in reality, face coverings have been shown to be highly effective at limiting transmission).

“I got calls into other countries but don’t know if I even want to give them now, because they don’t work,” he said.