Barstool Sports founder and owner Dave Portnoy claimed the Trump administration offered him a job to work at the Department of Commerce.
The businessman and social media personality said he received the job offer through a phone call that he described as “weird.” Portnoy claimed he mentioned the offer during an interview on Fox News earlier this year but that “no one paid attention to it.” He mentioned the job offer again in a video he posted to his X account.
“I got a call, I don’t know, a couple of months ago?” Portnoy said. “I don’t know when I got the call. It was like, ‘Hey, would you have any interest, Dave, in joining the Department of Commerce – commerce secretary under [Howard] Lutnick, or the guy working under him.’”
Portnoy said he was uninterested in the job, and no one from the administration followed up with him about it. He also said that to take the job, he was told he would have had to relinquish control of Barstool Sports.
“But a caveat of joining the government is somebody would have to run Barstool,” Portnoy said. “You can’t run Barstool and work for the government.”
“Even if I wanted to do that, they never, liked, followed up,” Portnoy elaborated. “They’re like, let us know if you could find somebody to run Barstool and if you’re interested. And if you are interested, we’ll schedule a call in a week to go over the next steps. That never happened. So, it was weird.”
Portnoy, however, questioned how Elon Musk was not being held to the same standard about owning a company and working for the government.
“I guess Elon doesn’t have a specific title, but you kinda want your CEO with the eye on the ball, right?” he theorized. And while Musk is technically not considered a government official or employee, the amount of attention required to do both jobs was not lost on Portnoy.
“The one thing I do wonder with Elon, he’s the CEO of Tesla, obviously, and he’s doing all this DOGE stuff, which I think is good,” Portnoy said. “Get rid of government waste, I’m for that. But how do you run Tesla when you’re working on DOGE 24/7?”
“You kind of want your CEO with the eye on the ball, right?” Portnoy said.