The Onion bought Alex Jones' Infowars in a court-ordered bankruptcy auction, but a judge yesterday voided the result, saying it "left money on the table." Jones owes more than a billion dollars to families of children killed in a mass shooting he falsely claimed was a hoax. He sued to block the auction result after another company affiliated with him offered more cash than The Onion, but lost the auction.
The Sandy Hook families—the beneficiaries of the legal action—supported The Onion's offer despite the lower cash value for an obvious reason: they don't want Alex Jones to be able to buy his own site back and keep using it against them. They also think that in the long run they'd make more money anyway from The Onion's plan to use it as a humor site. But the judge felt otherwise.
The Onion's bid was backed by the families of eight victims of the school shooting and one first responder. According to court documents, The Onion, via its parent company Global Tetrahedron, offered $1.75 million in cash along with a "credit" from the Connecticut families, who offered to forgo 100% of their portion of the winning bid to support the effort, valuing the bid at $7 million. The one other competing bid, at $3.5 million in cash, came from First United American Companies, which is affiliated with Jones and operates his lucrative online nutritional supplements store. But Lopez said he took issue with the auction process. The court-appointed trustee in the case, who had wide discretion to handle the auction and chose the winner based on his own judgement, had initially said there would be a live auction.
If it's funny how transparent Jones' bankruptcy shenanigans are as a strategy to avoid paying the earlier judgments—not least because he's still living the high life and has these affiliated companies throwing millions around on his behalf—it's not funny at all that the courts ultimately have his interests at heart. The rage meter is poppin' in America.
