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This is probably the correct decision. Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash, and in the case of a bankruptcy, cash completely trumps any notion of

This is probably the correct decision. Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash, and in the case of a bankruptcy, cash completely trumps any notion of "giving up debt." Especially when the debt being settled is astronomically large and you are giving up a very small portion of it ($7 million out of $1.5 billion). The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar. Additionally, the auction here was run farcically, and basically seemed designed to create an outcome where the onion gets to buy this website for no money.

alwa 2y ago
Isn't it a little strange, though, that the system notionally decided that the families are owed an enormous amount of economic power as compensation for the nasty behavior of Alex Jones' media company, but at the same time it's obliging them not to use that economic power to prevent the sale of the media company to a "new owner" still affiliated with an unrepentant Alex Jones, who will undoubtedly continue the nasty behavior? Just in order to get cash to compensate them at pennies on the dollar for his previous round of nasty behavior? I have to say, just as a matter of gut instinct, it sure feels like when the court finds that Alex Jones damaged people—at a value orders of magnitude beyond that of his company—those people should be allowed to decide that, to them, there's value in snuffing out his ill-behaving company altogether. Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...
- acomjean 2y ago
  Selling to a business involved with the individual that lost in court.. It seems like a Fraudulent Conveyance to my non lawyer self (but I could be wrong) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_conveyance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_conveyance
  - rfw300 2y ago
    It's not a good outcome, but it's also not fraudulent conveyance. Principally because the proceeds of the sale go to the victims.
    - ipaddr 2y ago
      They go to the creditors including his primary sponsor. This is not a bad outcome it's the only correct legal outcome. What you are saying is we should allow a creditor (of many) to sell an asset to whoever they choose at a lower market rate because it's the right political move in this one case. Why wouldn't those rules be applied in other cases.. you can sell any asset for a dollar to yourself and the bankrupt person will still be on the hook for the total debt minus a dollar. Letting a single creditor value assets below marketrate and direct a sale to someone they wanted would be a completely unfair process.
      - redeux 2y ago
        This isn’t about politics, it’s about justice. The only reason politics is even in the equation is because Jones has made his living as a political blatherskite.
        johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Law is almost inherently poliical. Politics was in the equation the moment Jones decided to pretend a tragic school shooting was fake news.
        redeux 2y ago
        So where is justice in this equation then?
        johnnyanmac 2y ago
        The plantiffs getting compensated is the "justice". The courts ruled wrongdoing and the consequence is some sort of payout.
- ipaddr 2y ago
  They have a debt judgement not economic power. They can sell that debit judgement to a company who collects. They can take the money from the result of the court process and try to buy infowars after this is all over. They don't have a judgement of ownership in infowars they have a debt and the court is forcing Alex to sell all assets to cover the debt. Then the rest is written off and he gets a black mark on his credit report. There are rules around this process for a reason. If you allowed someone who has a debt judgement to just take over a company what is it's true value. Alex could try to value infowars at a trillion. So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. That's the fairest way for all cases. Besides others are in line as well. And killing the infowars brand means little in the short/long run. The real brand is Alex's name. It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.
  - Retric 2y ago
    > So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. Except Onion’s bid minimized Alex Jones debt and was the preferred outcome by his creditors. Offering more cash isn’t the same as making a larger bid here.
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      It was the preferred outcome by the majority of his creditors, not by all his creditors (note that preferred != economically best). If the creditors were unanimous in their preferences, there would be no issue before the court.
      - Retric 2y ago
        No the judge stated he believes it could be sold at a higher price not that the deal wasn’t structured properly. There’s been confusion on the math. Because one party was forgoing a portion of their share everyone else not just the other victims would be better off financially. ps: Economic maximization alone isn’t relevant here. The underlying economic value matters when individuals aren’t voluntarily participating in a transaction. If I destroy your car then I owe you based on the cars worth, but if you trade in your car moderately under blue book perhaps you’re just in a hurry.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  There was no public auction of InfoWars. That alone is a stain on the whole process. The objective of a bankruptcy court is not to institute some arbitrary meta-ethical standard. It is to deliver maximum cash to the creditors in a fair manner. >Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan... Based on discussions I've heard on this subject, a subset of the families was pledging money they didn't have in the non-competitive bidding. This is highly questionable. They may never receive the money they claim for the purchase. So by buying a real asset on the promise of money they aren't going to get, it is taking money away from other people who are rightfully owed money. If they wanted to do it the right way they could try to borrow the money from someone, but nobody in their right mind thinks Alex Jones has this money or ever did. The size of the judgement was calculated to lead to exactly this conclusion. As you said, the judgement was orders of magnitude more than the value of his company. So you should be satisfied with that. It is not necessary for the funniest possible outcome to manifest in order for justice to be served. Alex Jones will not go away because he has rights just like anyone else, and the legal process must conclude eventually.
  - avs733 2y ago
    > There was no public auction of InfoWars. That alone is a stain on the whole process. The objective of a bankruptcy court is not to institute some arbitrary meta-ethical standard. It is to deliver maximum cash to the creditors in a fair manner. Again, maximimum value not cash.
    - wakawaka28 2y ago
      I say cash loosely speaking. You at least cannot pledge income from debt that is presently being negotiated down or cancelled. That kind of thing isn't "value" because it's imaginary.
      - avs733 2y ago
        but you can pledge the debt itself.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- avianlyric 2y ago
  > Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan... Nope. Under the rejected deal, other creditors would have seen a larger payout, because aggrieved families are actual two separate groups. One with a claim near a billion dollars, and other with a claim of only a few million (I think, it may be less). As a result the aggrieved families with the larger claim were set to basically hoover up all the cash from the bankruptcy, and the deal with the Onion was to create a better deal for the other families by having the larger claim reduced to allow a fair split of the total cash raised.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    Also of note, the other creditors agreed to this bid.
- fennecfoxy 2y ago
  Nah it's just typical rich people getting away with everything stuff & we'll continue to let it happen because we are hapless.
  - StefanBatory 2y ago
    It does really appear that America's getting her own, homegrown oligarchs.
    - NoGravitas 2y ago
      We've had them for a long time; basically the only time we've tried to reduce their power was the Great Depression and post-WWII era, but since the 70s we've been letting them off the leash.
      - entropicdrifter 2y ago
        Correct. 10/10 summary
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller... we've had them.
      - paulryanrogers 2y ago
        They've mostly kept a low profile since the Great Depression though. And plenty would be oligarchs were taxed out of the upper class by the WW2 tax brackets.
        etc-hosts 2y ago
        The families that lost their wealth in the Civil War and the families who had to pay a little more tax because of the New Deal and the people still mad about LBJ era civil rights legislation have all banded together.
    - 2y ago
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > I have to say, just as a matter of gut instinct, it sure feels like when the court finds that Alex Jones damaged people—at a value orders of magnitude beyond that of his company—those people should be allowed to decide that, to them, there's value in snuffing out his ill-behaving company altogether. It seems like there's an easy way for them to do that though: Just bid on it themselves and dispose of it however they want. They can bid arbitrarily high because they're the ones who get the money, if they want to dismantle the company or sell it to The Onion more than they want the money from what would otherwise be the highest bidder.
  - freejazz 2y ago
    Not if they have to put up actual cash...
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Do they though? Put up that portion of the debt owed to them by the estate, which should be valued in at least that amount.
      - freejazz 2y ago
        Did you read the article? That's exactly what they did.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Did you read the article? Jones was arguing that the families shouldn't be able to do that but the article doesn't say anything about whether he won that argument and the only reason it specifies for why the judge rejected the sale is this: > Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret. Which implies they might just be able to redo the auction without secret bids and get the same result.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  >Isn't it a little strange, though, that the system notionally decided that the families are owed an enormous amount of economic power as compensation for the nasty behavior of Alex Jones' media company, but at the same time it's obliging them not to use that economic power to prevent the sale of the media company to a "new owner" still affiliated with an unrepentant Alex Jones, who will undoubtedly continue the nasty behavior? Just in order to get cash to compensate them at pennies on the dollar for his previous round of nasty behavior? This is regrettable, but I don't think the court system offers a remedy sufficient for the grief Jones caused. This is why the court awarded what is frankly an absurd sum... truly, what is the point of awarding numbers that large? They're never paid out. There this a strict defamation case, where the plaintiff's reputations were actually damaged in a way that harmed their income/worth, then we'd likely have seen a more rational award. Whatever it was that Jones did to these people, it's not the same tort as defamation. In that, he calls them embezzlers or pedos or something, they lose their jobs... and we can put a number to the damage he inflicted. Instead, he claimed they were actors, they never had any children, and this was some sort of hoax. Had crazy people coming out of the woodwork to harass them and stalk them. But the only sort of court order that could remediate that would be one that muzzles Jones from saying this shit... prior restraint. Something the Constitution wouldn't allow for. I actually wonder if what he did shouldn't be characterized as a crime instead of a tort. Were he prosecuted and imprisoned (or even just put on probation), then the government would have the authority/leverage to (temporarily) prohibit this speech. Even then, he'd be made a martyr by his fans and it would continue as soon as the sentence was served.
- ljsprague 2y ago
  $1.5 billion is more than Exxon paid for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Alex Jones must have been really nasty.
  - etc-hosts 2y ago
    I don't know everything but I visited Valdez once and the locals told me Exxon wrote the 1.5 billion off of their taxable income so ended up not being punished.
    - gregw2 2y ago
      The locals are right to be pissed. But the logic seems a bit flawed... when you spend 2.1 billion in funding and then write it off on taxes, you are not saving 2.1 billion, you are saving YourTaxRate% of 2.1 billion, right? The environment is lucky that it was Exxon who made the mistake of hiring an incompetent and overworked crew (per NTSB); they had more resources to deal with the consequences of an (allegedly?) drunk captain than smaller firms. I had a PhD relative working at Exxon whose work was halted and spent a year or two of his life working on the mess; not sure if that was part of the 2.1 billion or in addition to it. Certainly there was non-financial opportunity cost not even measured. Like "Fire safety codes written in blood", the international requirement for oil tankers to have double hulls ensued.
UncleOxidant 2y ago
> Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash Wait, isn't Alex Jone's essentially bankrupted by the ruling for the Sandy Hook parents? If he has that much cash to offer wouldn't that have been given to the parents who won the suit?
- unsnap_biceps 2y ago
  I believe officially the vitamin company is owned by his parents and isn't included in the judgement against Alex Jones.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    How is that not fraud?
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      It is. IIRC he started shuffling assets only after the legal consequences got real. But the legal system is moving slowly. And the victims may get tired of chasing his assets
      - mrguyorama 2y ago
        >But the legal system is moving slowly. FFS, it's actively working in his favor right now!
    - morkalork 2y ago
      It's certainly mafia type of behavior. Now Jones has learned the lesson that as long as he doesn't directly own anything, he is effectively defamation proof. It's almost like an inverse RICO case, he does all the crime whole holding none of the money vs a mob boss rolling in dough while never directly committing the crimes.
    - baggachipz 2y ago
      Since when has that mattered? He'll get a pardon in 1 month anyway.
UltraSane 2y ago
How can any entity related to Alex Jones be allowed to buy the InfoWars assets?
- anon291 2y ago
  In the same way non-corporate 'entities' related to Alex Jones don't owe his debts. If there's a company of which he's a minority owner, they could decide to buy it, and it would be like his brother buying it.
  - UltraSane 2y ago
    It is pure bullshit is what it is.
    - anon291 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - paulryanrogers 2y ago
        To bankrupt someone who exploited the families of a horrific crime to enrich himself. Not a pretend bankruptcy after most of the real assets have been shuffled off the board ahead of sentencing.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - triceratops 2y ago
        > How exactly is Alex Jones supposed to pay $1 billion dollars to anyone? One dollar after another.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Alex Jones shuffles assets moments before a legal proceeding (or perhaps during it), goes bankrupt, and his shuffled assets can buy the assets he "lost". I don't have enough legal knowledge to call it fraud, but it sure sounds like what I'd call as a layman "pure bullshit". >How exactly is Alex Jones supposed to pay $1 billion dollars to anyone? That sounds like the job of a bankruptcy court now, doesn't it? Pure bullshit #2: all creditors and debtors agreed on something and suddenly Jones himself says "no not that way!" Why does the debtor get to decide where and how he sells the assets he no longer owns? >What is the purpose of this entire spectacle? in case you forgot, a "major news network" tried to play off a tragic school shooting that isn't even 15 years old as a hoax. The family sued and he lost a defamation case over it. In the US (it's REALLY hard to claim defamation in the US, so you really screw up if you lose here). On top of all of that all, Jones did all his darndest to drag out and overall disrespect the legal system though a mix of shuffling assets, missing court dates, and so many other pieces of foul play that would get any normal citizen charged with perjury (he may have been charged that). That is surely why his ruling costs ran so high. So the purpose of this entire spectacle runs on 2 major points: 1. don't try to play off a modern, highly televised and recorded event in modern history as a "hoax", especially on a topic as serious as school shootings 2. Don't be a legal asshole and piss off judges in a court case. That latter one shouldn't even need to be said, but between this and the Gawker trial we clearly have a lot of children who treat the judicial system like it's some casual date on Tinder. Judges don't like being ghosted.
whoitwas 2y ago
[flagged]
geor9e 2y ago
Are there practically any other creditors? I would think the creditor owed $1.5B would cause all other creditors to become irrelevant rounding errors as a fraction of a percent. So if the families were to bid $X, then they'd be paying it right back into their other pocket. Seems like just a technicality or theatrics to require them to temporarily come up with cash just to give it right back to themselves. But lawyers love arguing technicalities.
- habinero 2y ago
  Yes, the set of Sandy Hook parents who won $1.5B would normally get essentially everything, but the Onion agreement had the minority creditors get a lot more money.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  All debt is not equal in seniority (seniority != amount), and yes, there are other creditors. Many people have credit cards, get bank loans, and have a mortgage, and I assume he has also borrowed money from several other sources. Those are creditors. The next thing to do is think about the order these people get to take money in. Debt isn't one pool, it's a set of multiple priority queues. Asset-backed lines of credit typically have a senior claim to that asset but a junior claim to the general pool of money - Alex Jones, if forced to sell a hypothetical car with a hypothetical $1000 loan, will be paying back that loan in its entirety (if covered by the sale of the car) before the proceeds of that sale go to the $1.5 billion debt. Your general accounts are similarly ordered.
habinero 2y ago
No, Legal Eagle covered the sale, and the agreement giving it to the Onion maximized the proceeds to both of the Sandy Hook groups that have won judgement against Alex Jones. With the sale to Alex Jones's set of straw buyers, that wasn't true.
- jeltz 2y ago
  The sale to Alex Jones would have given the creditors basically nothing since the assets used to buy should already be theirs.
ThrustVectoring 2y ago
>The other creditors are far better off getting more cash The other creditors get more cash from The Onion's offer. It was specifically structured to give better-than-next-offer remuneration to minority creditors.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  The Onion didn't have the cash. It was basically an IOU from one of the families, which is like saying "the very same guy going bankrupt is going to pay us money to buy this business from him" and that makes zero sense. There was also no transparency in the bidding. It should have been a simple auction, to get the maximum amount of money.
  - ThrustVectoring 2y ago
    > The Onion didn't have the cash. Correct, it was given up by the majority creditors in exchange for non-monetary considerations (specifically, the moral victory of having The Onion own Infowars). > It was basically an IOU from one of the families This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason. > There was also no transparency in the bidding. It should have been a simple auction, to get the maximum amount of money. This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.
    - wakawaka28 2y ago
      >This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason. You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash. Then it gets divied up accordingly. >This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit. Isn't it telling that the same judge said it was done improperly? Trustees have an obligation to follow standard practices which maximize cash flow or at least don't give the appearance of impropriety.
fzeroracer 2y ago
There's a deep irony in your post that you say it's the correct decision when it's Alex Jones attempting to strongarm his Infowars rights back after losing them in court because he failed to pay his outstanding debts. Like you do see the obvious corruption here, right?
archagon 2y ago
> Additionally, the auction here was run farcically, and basically seemed designed to create an outcome where the onion gets to buy this website for no money. You have been lied to. As I see it, the situation couldn't be any simpler: the oligarchs will take what they want, justice be damned. It was a done deal as soon as Musk entered the scene.
avianlyric 2y ago
> Especially when the debt being settled is astronomically large and you are giving up a very small portion of it ($7 million out of $1.5 billion). The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar. The whole purpose of the deal was to give everyone, except the largest creditor, more cash. Sure the other deal offered 2x more cash, but the largest creditor is so disproportionately large compared to all the other creditors, they would have basically taken all the cash and left little to nothing for the other creditors. The rejected deal involved the largest creditor voluntarily giving up part of their claim, resulting in a much larger (I.e. something like 10x larger) payout for other creditors, despite the lower dollar value on the entire deal. So yeah, the other creditors are far better off getting more cash. But to do that InfoWars would need to sell for many multiples more than highest bid seen so far.
benj111 2y ago
>Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash Yes, but shouldn't that already be due to the victims? This is worse for the victims, because rather than getting that money, and future revenue, they just get that money. And this all ignores the harm to the victims, of giving Jones control of Infowars again. They aren't ever going to see all of this $1.5B. I doubt most even want all that money, what they probably want is for Jones not to be able to keep his mouth piece.
reedf1 2y ago
I read the details of the auction out of interest. I think it is valid, and in the best interests of the creditors as it currently stands. Interested to see how others have read into it that they offered "more". It was a blind auction and the result is clearly in the best interests of the creditors to take the onion deal.
sarchertech 2y ago
>2x more cash But because the largest creditor has a claim that is so much larger, the minority creditors will actually get less cash with the vitamin company offer. The deal was structured so that the minority creditors would get more cash than from any other offer. The only creditor that would get less cash from this offer is the sandy hook families and they are fine with that.
- Breza 2y ago
  A very important point. The Onion was going to give $100,000 more to the other creditors than any other bid. That sounds like the better deal. I can't imagine being owed money and having the judge tell me that I'm being forced to get less money in the interest of fairness.
micromacrofoot 2y ago
it's fraud, Jones' parents own the vitamin company
snowwrestler 2y ago
How is it the correct decision that Alex Jones has a judgment against him for more money than he claims to have, but also Alex Jones has enough money to enter a bid to satisfy the judgement? It’s a farce.
- avs733 2y ago
  but if we launder it through law talking then it cannot be questioned.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  My comment has nothing to do with moral righteousness, merely legal correctness. However, the idea that the InfoWars brand is worth less than $10 million is a bit silly to me given its reach among crazy (and highly manipulable) people, and the low size of both bids (and the fact that only people intimately involved in bankruptcy procedures knew when and how to put in bids) suggests that the auction process was probably not run correctly.
  - pythonaut_16 2y ago
    So where were all the other bidders offering $10 million plus?
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      Not there because the auction was run in a terrible way - it was very hard to submit a bid and the due date got moved forward at the last minute. There were rumblings that Elon Musk was going to put in a big bid.
      - jazzyjackson 2y ago
        No but honestly who has any use for the Infowars brand besides Alex Jones and the Onion? What would anyone do with it to get a return on their investment?
        2y ago
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Will hold judgement until I read the judge’s opinion, but this bit: “‘It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,’ Judge Lopez said.” is nonsense from an auction theoretical perspective. First-price sealed-bid auctions are a vetted auction system [1]—almost all real estate and corporate mergers, for example, are sold like this, as are government tenders [2]. (They’re not as efficient as Vickrey auctions [3], but nobody actually does that.) The bankruptcy estate is selling the asset. Not Alex Jones. The creditors should be deciding who buys their stuff. Not a judge. (The judge is there to coördinate the creditors, not substitute his judgement for theirs.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_auction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_aucti... [2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sealed-bid-auction.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sealed-bid-auction.asp [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  Like other commenters, you have posited a theoretical framework for how a bankruptcy court theoretically should work. None of this is how bankruptcy court actually works.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > you have posited a theoretical framework for how a bankruptcy court theoretically should work. None of this is how bankruptcy court actually works Literally started by saying I'm holding judgement until reading the opinion. My point is simply that if the reason the judge raised for re-starting the process is solely around the bids being sealed, they're wrong in a provable way.
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      Oh, it's not that at all. The problem with auction procedures in this case wasn't the actual auction methodology, but the lack of notice and the difficulty of submitting a bid. In any case, a judge does make the decisions in a bankruptcy court when the parties disagree about things. In this case, the creditors are not in agreement that this was okay. A sealed-bid auction is a bit non-standard in a bankruptcy, but there should be no problem if all the bids get revealed post-facto. I wouldn't be surprised if this was mentioned in the opinion because it doesn't help you say that the auction was fair in light of everything else (if you're going to do non-standard stiff, do it in a very clean-looking way).
rtkwe 2y ago
Nothing in the order says the accounting of the bid value was wrong it was mostly the form of the auction taking place as a single sealed bid round that the judge seems to quibble with. Counting debt as part of the bid is also not that unusual or weird, banks will bid their outstanding debt on foreclosure auctions all the time to get control of the house and sell it normally.
jasonlotito 2y ago
> This is probably the correct decision. It is 100% not. It makes fewer creditors whole. Simple as that. It's worse for all creditors involved, as per the creditors. Any suggestion that this is "correct" or better is out of ignorance or deceit. > The other creditors are far better off getting more cash The nature of the original deal guaranteed the other creditors got more money than they would from the other offer by $100,000 more. Suggesting that they were getting less is ignorant. > the onion gets to buy this website for no money. Again, the Onion was spending real cash. At best your are completely ignorant of the deal.
- shkkmo 2y ago
  It's correct if there's a new, open auction that does even better than the current Onion offer.
  - pyrale 2y ago
    ...But then, why not cancel that new auction too, in hopes that a third auction will yield even more?
  - _djo_ 2y ago
    The judge ruled out holding a new auction.
cogman10 2y ago
> cash completely trumps any notion of "giving up debt." Not true. The entire point of bankruptcy proceedings is to resolve debt to the creditors. And in fact, that wasn't the issue that the Judge took here. The judge didn't like the amount, not the creditors bid. > The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar. The other creditors signed off on the deal which is why the Trustee took the bid. Alex Jones would have $3.5 million dollars less debt than if he took the FAUC bid. Which is exactly what the Trustee should prioritize, cutting back on Jone's debt.
iancmceachern 2y ago
Side question, because this is the first I'm hearing of him selling vitamins. Can his vitamins possibly be good? Who would buy these over day, centrum or Costco gummy vitamins. This is weird to me.
cyanydeez 2y ago
If the victims wanted to be victimized again just because people offer more money to continue the victimization operation, sure. Unfortunately, giving the victims no choice in who owns this stuff means allowing it to be reused for the same harm. Money is not the only variable in the equation. This is not a legal interpretation of the judges decision.
immibis 2y ago
So Alex Jones gets to cheat his way out of consequences yet again by transferring his assets to a new company and shopping for a sympathetic judge, just like the last several times?

alwa 2y ago

Isn't it a little strange, though, that the system notionally decided that the families are owed an enormous amount of economic power as compensation for the nasty behavior of Alex Jones' media company, but at the same time it's obliging them not to use that economic power to prevent the sale of the media company to a "new owner" still affiliated with an unrepentant Alex Jones, who will undoubtedly continue the nasty behavior? Just in order to get cash to compensate them at pennies on the dollar for his previous round of nasty behavior? I have to say, just as a matter of gut instinct, it sure feels like when the court finds that Alex Jones damaged people—at a value orders of magnitude beyond that of his company—those people should be allowed to decide that, to them, there's value in snuffing out his ill-behaving company altogether. Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...

acomjean 2y ago
Selling to a business involved with the individual that lost in court.. It seems like a Fraudulent Conveyance to my non lawyer self (but I could be wrong) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_conveyance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_conveyance
- rfw300 2y ago
  It's not a good outcome, but it's also not fraudulent conveyance. Principally because the proceeds of the sale go to the victims.
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    They go to the creditors including his primary sponsor. This is not a bad outcome it's the only correct legal outcome. What you are saying is we should allow a creditor (of many) to sell an asset to whoever they choose at a lower market rate because it's the right political move in this one case. Why wouldn't those rules be applied in other cases.. you can sell any asset for a dollar to yourself and the bankrupt person will still be on the hook for the total debt minus a dollar. Letting a single creditor value assets below marketrate and direct a sale to someone they wanted would be a completely unfair process.
    - redeux 2y ago
      This isn’t about politics, it’s about justice. The only reason politics is even in the equation is because Jones has made his living as a political blatherskite.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Law is almost inherently poliical. Politics was in the equation the moment Jones decided to pretend a tragic school shooting was fake news.
        redeux 2y ago
        So where is justice in this equation then?
        johnnyanmac 2y ago
        The plantiffs getting compensated is the "justice". The courts ruled wrongdoing and the consequence is some sort of payout.
ipaddr 2y ago
They have a debt judgement not economic power. They can sell that debit judgement to a company who collects. They can take the money from the result of the court process and try to buy infowars after this is all over. They don't have a judgement of ownership in infowars they have a debt and the court is forcing Alex to sell all assets to cover the debt. Then the rest is written off and he gets a black mark on his credit report. There are rules around this process for a reason. If you allowed someone who has a debt judgement to just take over a company what is it's true value. Alex could try to value infowars at a trillion. So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. That's the fairest way for all cases. Besides others are in line as well. And killing the infowars brand means little in the short/long run. The real brand is Alex's name. It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.
- Retric 2y ago
  > So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. Except Onion’s bid minimized Alex Jones debt and was the preferred outcome by his creditors. Offering more cash isn’t the same as making a larger bid here.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    It was the preferred outcome by the majority of his creditors, not by all his creditors (note that preferred != economically best). If the creditors were unanimous in their preferences, there would be no issue before the court.
    - Retric 2y ago
      No the judge stated he believes it could be sold at a higher price not that the deal wasn’t structured properly. There’s been confusion on the math. Because one party was forgoing a portion of their share everyone else not just the other victims would be better off financially. ps: Economic maximization alone isn’t relevant here. The underlying economic value matters when individuals aren’t voluntarily participating in a transaction. If I destroy your car then I owe you based on the cars worth, but if you trade in your car moderately under blue book perhaps you’re just in a hurry.
wakawaka28 2y ago
There was no public auction of InfoWars. That alone is a stain on the whole process. The objective of a bankruptcy court is not to institute some arbitrary meta-ethical standard. It is to deliver maximum cash to the creditors in a fair manner. >Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan... Based on discussions I've heard on this subject, a subset of the families was pledging money they didn't have in the non-competitive bidding. This is highly questionable. They may never receive the money they claim for the purchase. So by buying a real asset on the promise of money they aren't going to get, it is taking money away from other people who are rightfully owed money. If they wanted to do it the right way they could try to borrow the money from someone, but nobody in their right mind thinks Alex Jones has this money or ever did. The size of the judgement was calculated to lead to exactly this conclusion. As you said, the judgement was orders of magnitude more than the value of his company. So you should be satisfied with that. It is not necessary for the funniest possible outcome to manifest in order for justice to be served. Alex Jones will not go away because he has rights just like anyone else, and the legal process must conclude eventually.
- avs733 2y ago
  > There was no public auction of InfoWars. That alone is a stain on the whole process. The objective of a bankruptcy court is not to institute some arbitrary meta-ethical standard. It is to deliver maximum cash to the creditors in a fair manner. Again, maximimum value not cash.
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    I say cash loosely speaking. You at least cannot pledge income from debt that is presently being negotiated down or cancelled. That kind of thing isn't "value" because it's imaginary.
    - avs733 2y ago
      but you can pledge the debt itself.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
avianlyric 2y ago
> Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan... Nope. Under the rejected deal, other creditors would have seen a larger payout, because aggrieved families are actual two separate groups. One with a claim near a billion dollars, and other with a claim of only a few million (I think, it may be less). As a result the aggrieved families with the larger claim were set to basically hoover up all the cash from the bankruptcy, and the deal with the Onion was to create a better deal for the other families by having the larger claim reduced to allow a fair split of the total cash raised.
- cogman10 2y ago
  Also of note, the other creditors agreed to this bid.
fennecfoxy 2y ago
Nah it's just typical rich people getting away with everything stuff & we'll continue to let it happen because we are hapless.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  It does really appear that America's getting her own, homegrown oligarchs.
  - NoGravitas 2y ago
    We've had them for a long time; basically the only time we've tried to reduce their power was the Great Depression and post-WWII era, but since the 70s we've been letting them off the leash.
    - entropicdrifter 2y ago
      Correct. 10/10 summary
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller... we've had them.
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      They've mostly kept a low profile since the Great Depression though. And plenty would be oligarchs were taxed out of the upper class by the WW2 tax brackets.
      - etc-hosts 2y ago
        The families that lost their wealth in the Civil War and the families who had to pay a little more tax because of the New Deal and the people still mad about LBJ era civil rights legislation have all banded together.
  - 2y ago
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> I have to say, just as a matter of gut instinct, it sure feels like when the court finds that Alex Jones damaged people—at a value orders of magnitude beyond that of his company—those people should be allowed to decide that, to them, there's value in snuffing out his ill-behaving company altogether. It seems like there's an easy way for them to do that though: Just bid on it themselves and dispose of it however they want. They can bid arbitrarily high because they're the ones who get the money, if they want to dismantle the company or sell it to The Onion more than they want the money from what would otherwise be the highest bidder.
- freejazz 2y ago
  Not if they have to put up actual cash...
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Do they though? Put up that portion of the debt owed to them by the estate, which should be valued in at least that amount.
    - freejazz 2y ago
      Did you read the article? That's exactly what they did.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Did you read the article? Jones was arguing that the families shouldn't be able to do that but the article doesn't say anything about whether he won that argument and the only reason it specifies for why the judge rejected the sale is this: > Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret. Which implies they might just be able to redo the auction without secret bids and get the same result.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
>Isn't it a little strange, though, that the system notionally decided that the families are owed an enormous amount of economic power as compensation for the nasty behavior of Alex Jones' media company, but at the same time it's obliging them not to use that economic power to prevent the sale of the media company to a "new owner" still affiliated with an unrepentant Alex Jones, who will undoubtedly continue the nasty behavior? Just in order to get cash to compensate them at pennies on the dollar for his previous round of nasty behavior? This is regrettable, but I don't think the court system offers a remedy sufficient for the grief Jones caused. This is why the court awarded what is frankly an absurd sum... truly, what is the point of awarding numbers that large? They're never paid out. There this a strict defamation case, where the plaintiff's reputations were actually damaged in a way that harmed their income/worth, then we'd likely have seen a more rational award. Whatever it was that Jones did to these people, it's not the same tort as defamation. In that, he calls them embezzlers or pedos or something, they lose their jobs... and we can put a number to the damage he inflicted. Instead, he claimed they were actors, they never had any children, and this was some sort of hoax. Had crazy people coming out of the woodwork to harass them and stalk them. But the only sort of court order that could remediate that would be one that muzzles Jones from saying this shit... prior restraint. Something the Constitution wouldn't allow for. I actually wonder if what he did shouldn't be characterized as a crime instead of a tort. Were he prosecuted and imprisoned (or even just put on probation), then the government would have the authority/leverage to (temporarily) prohibit this speech. Even then, he'd be made a martyr by his fans and it would continue as soon as the sentence was served.
ljsprague 2y ago
$1.5 billion is more than Exxon paid for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Alex Jones must have been really nasty.
- etc-hosts 2y ago
  I don't know everything but I visited Valdez once and the locals told me Exxon wrote the 1.5 billion off of their taxable income so ended up not being punished.
  - gregw2 2y ago
    The locals are right to be pissed. But the logic seems a bit flawed... when you spend 2.1 billion in funding and then write it off on taxes, you are not saving 2.1 billion, you are saving YourTaxRate% of 2.1 billion, right? The environment is lucky that it was Exxon who made the mistake of hiring an incompetent and overworked crew (per NTSB); they had more resources to deal with the consequences of an (allegedly?) drunk captain than smaller firms. I had a PhD relative working at Exxon whose work was halted and spent a year or two of his life working on the mess; not sure if that was part of the 2.1 billion or in addition to it. Certainly there was non-financial opportunity cost not even measured. Like "Fire safety codes written in blood", the international requirement for oil tankers to have double hulls ensued.

UncleOxidant 2y ago

> Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash Wait, isn't Alex Jone's essentially bankrupted by the ruling for the Sandy Hook parents? If he has that much cash to offer wouldn't that have been given to the parents who won the suit?

unsnap_biceps 2y ago
I believe officially the vitamin company is owned by his parents and isn't included in the judgement against Alex Jones.
- bawolff 2y ago
  How is that not fraud?
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    It is. IIRC he started shuffling assets only after the legal consequences got real. But the legal system is moving slowly. And the victims may get tired of chasing his assets
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      >But the legal system is moving slowly. FFS, it's actively working in his favor right now!
  - morkalork 2y ago
    It's certainly mafia type of behavior. Now Jones has learned the lesson that as long as he doesn't directly own anything, he is effectively defamation proof. It's almost like an inverse RICO case, he does all the crime whole holding none of the money vs a mob boss rolling in dough while never directly committing the crimes.
  - baggachipz 2y ago
    Since when has that mattered? He'll get a pardon in 1 month anyway.

UltraSane 2y ago

How can any entity related to Alex Jones be allowed to buy the InfoWars assets?

anon291 2y ago
In the same way non-corporate 'entities' related to Alex Jones don't owe his debts. If there's a company of which he's a minority owner, they could decide to buy it, and it would be like his brother buying it.
- UltraSane 2y ago
  It is pure bullshit is what it is.
  - anon291 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      To bankrupt someone who exploited the families of a horrific crime to enrich himself. Not a pretend bankruptcy after most of the real assets have been shuffled off the board ahead of sentencing.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - triceratops 2y ago
      > How exactly is Alex Jones supposed to pay $1 billion dollars to anyone? One dollar after another.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Alex Jones shuffles assets moments before a legal proceeding (or perhaps during it), goes bankrupt, and his shuffled assets can buy the assets he "lost". I don't have enough legal knowledge to call it fraud, but it sure sounds like what I'd call as a layman "pure bullshit". >How exactly is Alex Jones supposed to pay $1 billion dollars to anyone? That sounds like the job of a bankruptcy court now, doesn't it? Pure bullshit #2: all creditors and debtors agreed on something and suddenly Jones himself says "no not that way!" Why does the debtor get to decide where and how he sells the assets he no longer owns? >What is the purpose of this entire spectacle? in case you forgot, a "major news network" tried to play off a tragic school shooting that isn't even 15 years old as a hoax. The family sued and he lost a defamation case over it. In the US (it's REALLY hard to claim defamation in the US, so you really screw up if you lose here). On top of all of that all, Jones did all his darndest to drag out and overall disrespect the legal system though a mix of shuffling assets, missing court dates, and so many other pieces of foul play that would get any normal citizen charged with perjury (he may have been charged that). That is surely why his ruling costs ran so high. So the purpose of this entire spectacle runs on 2 major points: 1. don't try to play off a modern, highly televised and recorded event in modern history as a "hoax", especially on a topic as serious as school shootings 2. Don't be a legal asshole and piss off judges in a court case. That latter one shouldn't even need to be said, but between this and the Gawker trial we clearly have a lot of children who treat the judicial system like it's some casual date on Tinder. Judges don't like being ghosted.

whoitwas 2y ago

[flagged]

geor9e 2y ago

Are there practically any other creditors? I would think the creditor owed $1.5B would cause all other creditors to become irrelevant rounding errors as a fraction of a percent. So if the families were to bid $X, then they'd be paying it right back into their other pocket. Seems like just a technicality or theatrics to require them to temporarily come up with cash just to give it right back to themselves. But lawyers love arguing technicalities.

habinero 2y ago
Yes, the set of Sandy Hook parents who won $1.5B would normally get essentially everything, but the Onion agreement had the minority creditors get a lot more money.
pclmulqdq 2y ago
All debt is not equal in seniority (seniority != amount), and yes, there are other creditors. Many people have credit cards, get bank loans, and have a mortgage, and I assume he has also borrowed money from several other sources. Those are creditors. The next thing to do is think about the order these people get to take money in. Debt isn't one pool, it's a set of multiple priority queues. Asset-backed lines of credit typically have a senior claim to that asset but a junior claim to the general pool of money - Alex Jones, if forced to sell a hypothetical car with a hypothetical $1000 loan, will be paying back that loan in its entirety (if covered by the sale of the car) before the proceeds of that sale go to the $1.5 billion debt. Your general accounts are similarly ordered.

habinero 2y ago

No, Legal Eagle covered the sale, and the agreement giving it to the Onion maximized the proceeds to both of the Sandy Hook groups that have won judgement against Alex Jones. With the sale to Alex Jones's set of straw buyers, that wasn't true.

jeltz 2y ago
The sale to Alex Jones would have given the creditors basically nothing since the assets used to buy should already be theirs.

ThrustVectoring 2y ago

>The other creditors are far better off getting more cash The other creditors get more cash from The Onion's offer. It was specifically structured to give better-than-next-offer remuneration to minority creditors.

wakawaka28 2y ago
The Onion didn't have the cash. It was basically an IOU from one of the families, which is like saying "the very same guy going bankrupt is going to pay us money to buy this business from him" and that makes zero sense. There was also no transparency in the bidding. It should have been a simple auction, to get the maximum amount of money.
- ThrustVectoring 2y ago
  > The Onion didn't have the cash. Correct, it was given up by the majority creditors in exchange for non-monetary considerations (specifically, the moral victory of having The Onion own Infowars). > It was basically an IOU from one of the families This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason. > There was also no transparency in the bidding. It should have been a simple auction, to get the maximum amount of money. This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    >This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason. You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash. Then it gets divied up accordingly. >This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit. Isn't it telling that the same judge said it was done improperly? Trustees have an obligation to follow standard practices which maximize cash flow or at least don't give the appearance of impropriety.

fzeroracer 2y ago

There's a deep irony in your post that you say it's the correct decision when it's Alex Jones attempting to strongarm his Infowars rights back after losing them in court because he failed to pay his outstanding debts. Like you do see the obvious corruption here, right?

archagon 2y ago

> Additionally, the auction here was run farcically, and basically seemed designed to create an outcome where the onion gets to buy this website for no money. You have been lied to. As I see it, the situation couldn't be any simpler: the oligarchs will take what they want, justice be damned. It was a done deal as soon as Musk entered the scene.

avianlyric 2y ago

> Especially when the debt being settled is astronomically large and you are giving up a very small portion of it ($7 million out of $1.5 billion). The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar. The whole purpose of the deal was to give everyone, except the largest creditor, more cash. Sure the other deal offered 2x more cash, but the largest creditor is so disproportionately large compared to all the other creditors, they would have basically taken all the cash and left little to nothing for the other creditors. The rejected deal involved the largest creditor voluntarily giving up part of their claim, resulting in a much larger (I.e. something like 10x larger) payout for other creditors, despite the lower dollar value on the entire deal. So yeah, the other creditors are far better off getting more cash. But to do that InfoWars would need to sell for many multiples more than highest bid seen so far.

benj111 2y ago

>Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash Yes, but shouldn't that already be due to the victims? This is worse for the victims, because rather than getting that money, and future revenue, they just get that money. And this all ignores the harm to the victims, of giving Jones control of Infowars again. They aren't ever going to see all of this $1.5B. I doubt most even want all that money, what they probably want is for Jones not to be able to keep his mouth piece.

reedf1 2y ago

I read the details of the auction out of interest. I think it is valid, and in the best interests of the creditors as it currently stands. Interested to see how others have read into it that they offered "more". It was a blind auction and the result is clearly in the best interests of the creditors to take the onion deal.

sarchertech 2y ago

>2x more cash But because the largest creditor has a claim that is so much larger, the minority creditors will actually get less cash with the vitamin company offer. The deal was structured so that the minority creditors would get more cash than from any other offer. The only creditor that would get less cash from this offer is the sandy hook families and they are fine with that.

Breza 2y ago
A very important point. The Onion was going to give $100,000 more to the other creditors than any other bid. That sounds like the better deal. I can't imagine being owed money and having the judge tell me that I'm being forced to get less money in the interest of fairness.

micromacrofoot 2y ago

it's fraud, Jones' parents own the vitamin company

snowwrestler 2y ago

How is it the correct decision that Alex Jones has a judgment against him for more money than he claims to have, but also Alex Jones has enough money to enter a bid to satisfy the judgement? It’s a farce.

avs733 2y ago
but if we launder it through law talking then it cannot be questioned.
pclmulqdq 2y ago
My comment has nothing to do with moral righteousness, merely legal correctness. However, the idea that the InfoWars brand is worth less than $10 million is a bit silly to me given its reach among crazy (and highly manipulable) people, and the low size of both bids (and the fact that only people intimately involved in bankruptcy procedures knew when and how to put in bids) suggests that the auction process was probably not run correctly.
- pythonaut_16 2y ago
  So where were all the other bidders offering $10 million plus?
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Not there because the auction was run in a terrible way - it was very hard to submit a bid and the due date got moved forward at the last minute. There were rumblings that Elon Musk was going to put in a big bid.
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
      No but honestly who has any use for the Infowars brand besides Alex Jones and the Onion? What would anyone do with it to get a return on their investment?
      - 2y ago

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

Will hold judgement until I read the judge’s opinion, but this bit: “‘It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,’ Judge Lopez said.” is nonsense from an auction theoretical perspective. First-price sealed-bid auctions are a vetted auction system [1]—almost all real estate and corporate mergers, for example, are sold like this, as are government tenders [2]. (They’re not as efficient as Vickrey auctions [3], but nobody actually does that.) The bankruptcy estate is selling the asset. Not Alex Jones. The creditors should be deciding who buys their stuff. Not a judge. (The judge is there to coördinate the creditors, not substitute his judgement for theirs.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_auction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_aucti... [2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sealed-bid-auction.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sealed-bid-auction.asp [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction

pclmulqdq 2y ago
Like other commenters, you have posited a theoretical framework for how a bankruptcy court theoretically should work. None of this is how bankruptcy court actually works.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > you have posited a theoretical framework for how a bankruptcy court theoretically should work. None of this is how bankruptcy court actually works Literally started by saying I'm holding judgement until reading the opinion. My point is simply that if the reason the judge raised for re-starting the process is solely around the bids being sealed, they're wrong in a provable way.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    Oh, it's not that at all. The problem with auction procedures in this case wasn't the actual auction methodology, but the lack of notice and the difficulty of submitting a bid. In any case, a judge does make the decisions in a bankruptcy court when the parties disagree about things. In this case, the creditors are not in agreement that this was okay. A sealed-bid auction is a bit non-standard in a bankruptcy, but there should be no problem if all the bids get revealed post-facto. I wouldn't be surprised if this was mentioned in the opinion because it doesn't help you say that the auction was fair in light of everything else (if you're going to do non-standard stiff, do it in a very clean-looking way).

rtkwe 2y ago

Nothing in the order says the accounting of the bid value was wrong it was mostly the form of the auction taking place as a single sealed bid round that the judge seems to quibble with. Counting debt as part of the bid is also not that unusual or weird, banks will bid their outstanding debt on foreclosure auctions all the time to get control of the house and sell it normally.

jasonlotito 2y ago

> This is probably the correct decision. It is 100% not. It makes fewer creditors whole. Simple as that. It's worse for all creditors involved, as per the creditors. Any suggestion that this is "correct" or better is out of ignorance or deceit. > The other creditors are far better off getting more cash The nature of the original deal guaranteed the other creditors got more money than they would from the other offer by $100,000 more. Suggesting that they were getting less is ignorant. > the onion gets to buy this website for no money. Again, the Onion was spending real cash. At best your are completely ignorant of the deal.

shkkmo 2y ago
It's correct if there's a new, open auction that does even better than the current Onion offer.
- pyrale 2y ago
  ...But then, why not cancel that new auction too, in hopes that a third auction will yield even more?
- _djo_ 2y ago
  The judge ruled out holding a new auction.

cogman10 2y ago

> cash completely trumps any notion of "giving up debt." Not true. The entire point of bankruptcy proceedings is to resolve debt to the creditors. And in fact, that wasn't the issue that the Judge took here. The judge didn't like the amount, not the creditors bid. > The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar. The other creditors signed off on the deal which is why the Trustee took the bid. Alex Jones would have $3.5 million dollars less debt than if he took the FAUC bid. Which is exactly what the Trustee should prioritize, cutting back on Jone's debt.

iancmceachern 2y ago

Side question, because this is the first I'm hearing of him selling vitamins. Can his vitamins possibly be good? Who would buy these over day, centrum or Costco gummy vitamins. This is weird to me.

cyanydeez 2y ago

If the victims wanted to be victimized again just because people offer more money to continue the victimization operation, sure. Unfortunately, giving the victims no choice in who owns this stuff means allowing it to be reused for the same harm. Money is not the only variable in the equation. This is not a legal interpretation of the judges decision.

immibis 2y ago

So Alex Jones gets to cheat his way out of consequences yet again by transferring his assets to a new company and shopping for a sympathetic judge, just like the last several times?