Mike Lindell, the founder and CEO of MyPillow, could be considered a loser in many ways, but not in a way that will cost him $5 million. The New York Times reports that a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday that Lindell will not have to pay out the prize money for his “Prove Mike Wrong” challenge, which offered up a $5 million reward to anyone who could sufficiently debunk his baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Lindell offered up the prize money in 2021 during his “Cyber Symposium” event that he held in South Dakota, in which he laid out his “evidence” to prove that China hacked US voting machines and changed votes. Lindell invited cybersecurity experts to the event and offered up the prize money to anyone in attendance who could prove his findings to be inaccurate—a challenge that software engineer Robert Zeidman took on.
If you assume that proving Lindell’s findings are false would be easy, you’re not wrong. Lindell’s argument primarily hung on the idea that data from voting machines could be seen moving across Chinese servers. According to Zeidman’s account, he determined that Lindell’s files of ‘proof’ that votes were being manipulated by China were, in fact, a collection of nonsense data. Zeidman told Politico that the supposed “evidence” contained no voting machine packet capture data that would have shown the votes being transferred to Chinese servers. So he wrote up his report, submitted it, and sat back and waited for his $5 million payday.
The hard part, it turns out, is getting conspiracy theorists to admit they are wrong. Zeidman said he never heard from Lindell and had to file an arbitration lawsuit to have a court adjudicate whether he actually debunked the MyPillow guy’s findings. In 2023, a private arbitration panel ruled in Zeidman’s favor, determining that he proved “unequivocally” that Lindell’s data did not reflect 2020 election data. Lindell was given 30 days to pay up.
Now it looks like that payday will probably never come. Lindell appealed the ruling and got a decision in his favor, thanks to the fact that he provided extremely broad rules that apparently gave him lots of outs. “From the four corners of the Challenge contract as defined by the Official Rules, there is no way to read ‘information related to the November 2020 election’ as meaning only information that is packet capture data,” the court ruled.
“It’s a great day for our country,” Lindell told the Times, as if the entire United States was holding its breath, hoping that Mr. MyPillow wouldn’t have to give up any of his money. While Lindell seems to have wriggled out of this case for now, he’ll still have plenty more lawyer fees in front of him. Earlier this year, a court ruled that he must pay $2.3 million to a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems after Lindell called the worker a “traitor to the United States.” Lindell plans to appeal that one, too.
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