Read about Mike’s amazing story in The Washington Post’s article, From crack cocaine to Mar-a-Lago: The unusual journey of the MyPillow man. It truly is a story of “a journey that has run from pig pens and Las Vegas card tables to MyPillow fame and the gold-plated halls of Mar-a-Lago.”
Highlights:
- Mike’s early days: Before MyPillow, Mike jumped from business to business. He started a carpet cleaning company, then a lunch wagon business. Mike even tried his hand at counting cards at Las Vegas casinos plus raising pigs. He then purchased a bar business that, as Mike says, “Probably wasn’t a real good idea, because I was an addict at the time, a pretty hardcore cocaine addict.”
- Mike as an addict: Mike was a cocaine, then a crack cocaine addict for almost 20 years. In fact, it got so bad that he once had “so much crack cocaine pounding through his bloodstream he hadn’t slept for two weeks,” so his crack dealers actually refused to sell him drugs. In fact, one dealer took a picture of Mike’s “addict’s face” with “walking-dead skin tone, disheveled hair, and mug shot scowl.” as a “memento of what it looked like at rock bottom.” Mike has chosen to use the picture for his new book, What Are the Odds? From Crack Addict to CEO.
- The MyPillow business takes off: Through prayer, Mike became clean and sober overnight on January 16, 2009. And then the MyPillow business started really taking off as he took the “idea plucked from a dream into a successful international business claiming nearly 30 million sales.” This amazing growth is mostly due to the infamous infomercials, which, when they first came out, caused MyPillow to grow from 6 employees to 500 in a few months. MyPillow now has over 1,500 employees.
- Mike becomes a Trump supporter: Mike then stumbled into politics due to his strong support of President Trump. In fact, he had a meeting in 2016 with the then-candidate Trump, where they talked about Mike’s made-in-America business. Mike sent Trump and Melania pillows after that meeting, and received a personal message saying that they both “really liked MyPillow.” Mike was also at Trump’s 2017 inauguration. And, during the 2018 Easter weekend, Mike had dinner at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump said, “You are doing a great job, Michael,” and that he is “sleeping great on his MyPillow.”
As the article says, it’s been a quintessentially American wild ride, “a journey that has run from pig pens and Las Vegas card tables to MyPillow fame and the gold-plated halls of Mar-a-Lago.”