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The MyPillow guy supposedly stuffed a million dollars into his failed social media site

I’ve heard of keeping your money in your mattress but…

mypillow guy with money
Image: KnowTechie

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It’s time for another installment of the ongoing saga that is Frank, the social media site for right-wing nutjobs created by a right-wing nutjob, Mike Lindell of MyPillow fame.

This time around, it’s not the staggering hypocrisy of a free speech platform where you can’t say “fuck” or take the Lord’s name in vain, it’s the staggering amount of money that Mr. MyPillow stuffed into the site, to begin with.

A leaked Zoom call between Mike (who we’re going to refer to as MrPillow henceforth) and his IT team shows that he poured nearly a million dollars into hardware for the site, which was created by relative unknown Johnston Howse, who promise “Best in Class Broadcast Media Networks” while using a quickly-created Squarespace site to advertise.

That million dollars bought nine hefty Dell PowerEdge servers, each with huge amounts of SSD storage. Is that for what? Video storage? Image storage? The bill also only covers hardware and the initial setup.

The actual costs of running his soon-to-be-failed-if-its-not-already social media site for ‘conservative views’ are likely in the region of 10x that, with database costs, SaaS middleware, app development, and IT running costs all adding to that total.

The focus on owning your own hardware makes sense though, as no existing cloud provider would touch his site, or would shut it down eventually as Amazon Web Services did to Parler after it noticed the users engaging in illegal activity. Oh, and he cheaped out on the hardware too, sure he went brand-name heavy with Dell but it’s all refurbished gear. That’ll be fun with the number of storage drives he bought.

Maybe keep some of your money for your lawyers fees, MrPillow, you’re going to need it.

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Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.

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