Rumble CEO Finally Reveals What Charlie Kirk Did to Help Him

Yeah. Well, first, welcome to Sarasota, Longboat Key. I'll step back and tell you how I even found this place first and foremost. My parents have been coming here for 20 years as Canadian snowbirds. I fell in love with it. As you can see out there, it's as beautiful as it gets. But as Rumble was transitioning into this small company and growing very rapidly late in 2020 and early in 2021, Charlie not only before I get to the Longboat Key story, Charlie was actually the first investor in Rumble with JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, back in April of 2021.

Yeah, he was in that very first round and he was out of that group, I would say, by far the most active and most interested in that investment round person.

I met him, I don't exactly remember how I met him at that time, but it was probably through the investment. Actually, I think I met him shortly after Bonino joined Rumble in late 2020. So I actually knew him a little prior to him investing. So even before the investors, he ended up joining that investment round back early in 2021. But the most important part was that he was like the most active investor, the one that was most interested in helping Rumble and most interested in freeing speech as much as possible, allowing everyone to be able to have dialogue. He was adamant about that, as we already know, but he was instrumental in the building blocks of Rumble and really pushing that forward and supporting me, supporting this company to get where it was. And then that brings me to how we ended up here. Obviously, my parents were coming here and I fell in love with this place and I thought it was the right place. It just felt like Florida was the freest in the country in my mind. And it just felt right. And I remember Charlie telling me, he's like, 'I have a place in Florida in Sarasota.' I'm like, 'Really?' And he's like, 'Yeah.' So he ended up coming to Sarasota and we ended up looking for offices together. That's how involved he was. He didn't need to do that. Think about this, as an investor, most shareholders are just looking for returns on their investment. And Charlie wasn't that guy. In fact, I still think Charlie held his shares as far as I remember. I don't know for sure, but I've had conversations with him where he told me he held his shares in the company and he never sold. So he wasn't about that return on investment like the other investors. He was in it for really helping Rumble. So we go around, we're looking at offices, we walk into this very building on this very floor, and we sit down in this old boardroom. It had to have been done in the 70s or the 80s, right? I came here when it was pretty disreputed. That's right. And we had a reporter harass us when you came with us here. So we walk into this boardroom and there's tiles on the ground, the roof is falling apart. I think a hurricane just went through and it really destroyed this building. And we're sitting in this boardroom with these old chairs, this old wooden table, green carpets, and Charlie just looks around and he's like, 'Chris, this is going to be the Rumble headquarters. This is going to be the free speech capital of the world.' And I'm like, 'All right, we're going to do it.' And I never looked back. We're now sitting in this studio in the building that Charlie helped pick. And like I said, we've had many investors, many shareholders. Charlie was one of the few that really did it for the purpose of forwarding free speech, the actual idea of doing something great for America. And that's why that's where his heart was. That's why he was in this company. And that's why he helped build it with me. And he never stopped. We were meeting all the time. We were talking all the time. We're trying to figure out how to do certain things. And he was always involved, deeply involved. And for that, I'm forever grateful. Without him, Rumble wouldn't be where it is today. And it's important to reiterate that he wasn't an official adviser or anything. He was really doing this because he believed in the mission and he believed what Rumble was doing. Yeah, he had some stock, but he didn't have to be wandering around finding buildings with you or advising you or coordinating on free speech events or anything else.