WSJ: Trump Made Millions From Multilevel Marketing Firm

An image taken earlier this week from the website of 

multilevel marketing firm ACN shows company President 

Greg Provenzano with Donald Trump, and includes a 

comment from Mr. Trump about the company. ACN l

ater removed the material from its website.

Endorsements helped ACN, which has weathered regulatory probes

Over the past decade, Donald Trump has earned millions of dollars for extolling ACN Inc., a multilevel marketing firm that has weathered regulatory investigations in three countries.

Mr. Trump not only endorsed ACN, he twice featured the company on his former reality TV show, “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Both episodes featured teams of entertainment figures competing to promote versions of a video phone sold by the North Carolina firm.

“I think the ACN video phone is amazing,” Mr. Trump said in an ACN news release just before a two-hour, prime time Sunday night Celebrity Apprentice episode on the product in 2011. “I simply can’t imagine anybody using this phone and not loving it.”

Even before the show aired, the ACN video phone was in trouble. It sold poorly in part because it only worked with other ACN video phones, unlike Skype’s video-calling technology. The company had slashed orders for the phone from its supplier, which laid off 70% of its staff just before the show aired and later filed to liquidate in federal bankruptcy court, according to regulatory filings.

The bad news about the phones was never mentioned by Mr. Trump on the show, nor did he disclose to viewers he had been paid by ACN for appearances over the years. According to documents recently released by Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, he received $450,000 apiece for three of the most recent speeches for ACN, in 2014 and early this year.

In an interview this week, Mr. Trump said ACN had hired him to give motivational speeches. “I do not know the company. I know nothing about the company other than the people who run the company,” he said. “I’m not familiar with what they do or how they go about doing that, and I make that clear in my speeches.”

Mr. Trump said companies pay a fee to appear on “The Celebrity Apprentice.” “They paid a lot of money to go on the show,” he said. “It was like a two-hour advertisement, as opposed to a 30-second commercial.” NBCUniversal, which broadcast the show, declined to comment.

Both Mr. Trump and ACN described the video phone as a good product, but said technology’s rapid pace had killed it by the time the show aired five months after filming.

The phone problems were only a blip for ACN, which has turned the appearances on Mr. Trump’s show and his endorsement into a centerpiece of the pitch for its “home-based business opportunity.” The company recruits people to sell digital residential-phone service, wireless-phone service and satellite-TV service, as well as energy services through Xoom Energy LLC, which ACN says is controlled by ACN and its owners. Xoom is under scrutiny by Maryland utility regulators for allegedly deceptive sales tactics—allegations that Xoom denies.

For years, ACN devoted a section of its website to Mr. Trump, including his favorable comments about the company and a photo of him with its founders. After The Wall Street Journal interviewed Mr. Trump Tuesday afternoon about his relationship with ACN, mentions of Mr. Trump were deleted from the website. An ACN spokeswoman said the company decided to remove the material “in conjunction and with the full support of the Trump organization” because of Mr. Trump’s candidacy for president.

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