There's way too much nasty dross in this thread. No, the topic does not make that ok. As you'll see when you review the guidelines, "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Am I missing something or does this NYT article not actually say what the judge based his decision on? That would be an important piece of information to have when deciding whether the decision was good or not.
This is the legal pretext, which appears about 2/3 of the way through the article:
> 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.
I don't run auctions but something tells me there's a lot of research behind them that goes into optimizing for this precise thing. It's wild that the judge is disregarding the expertise of the person who was appointed by another judge to run the auction without asserting that the person is not qualified to run it.
The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale.
What's even more crazy about this ruling is he's told the trustee to come up with an alternative solution, that doesn't involve a new auction... But like no other guidance. That leaves the Trustee in a weird situation where the judge has said "I don't like what you did, fix it somehow, but not in a way that uses a new auction".
Frankly, this judge has just been pretty bad at their job. More than a few rulings have been just weird ramblings from the judge with unclear instructions to the trustee and the other parties.
And all this mainly appears to be because the judge doesn't like the amount that Infowars was sold for.
Out of curiosity, does anyone in this thread who is commenting on the quality of this judge or the sanity of his ruling practice bankruptcy law? I don’t, and I’m having a hard time evaluating these claims.
So he's been doing bankruptcy for five years, which should be enough time for him to understand the intricacies of the statutes and case law. Sometimes you see judges put in specialty courts with no experience in that domain and make some absurd rulings.
The Onion should be investigated for making a false bid for which they never had the money for.
>Jones' attorney Ben Broocks told Lopez at a hearing on Monday that the Onion only put up half as much cash as the $3.5 million offer from First American United Companies but boosted its bid with "smoke and mirrors" calculations.
Yes and Lopez rejected that as an issue. He also accepted the logic of why the Trustee picked the onion.
What Lopez did not like was the dollar amount and how the auction was ran, that's it.
Lopez kept the Trustee on board, though, because he doesn't believe the Trustee did anything wrong (Strangely since the Trustee organized the auction).
It wasn't a false bid, it was a bid that would have relieved Jones of more debt than the bid FAUC put up. Which was accepted by his creditors.
Judge Lopez was appointed by Trump, so I'd assume that he's acting under instructions. Why would Trump have appointed a judge who wouldn't do favors for him?
I believe the implication isn’t that he’d be fired. Rather that doing the bidding of the far right (as instructed) was the deal he made to get the job. I look at it as payment for services rendered.
Shouldn't all of the mechanics of the auction been agreed upon explicitly or at least implicitly with past precedent of bankruptcy auctions? How did the lawyers go ahead of an auction that even had a chance of being thrown out by the judge?
This is something that was brought up in the hearings.
For starters, one issue here is the Judge is just, frankly, bad at giving instructions. He left how the auction should be ran up to the Trustee who ultimately used an auction company which handles these sorts of liquation auctions. He didn't give clear instructions on what he wanted.
FAUC (alex jones's new company) did not raise any issues with the auction until after they found out that they lost. They had multiple communications with the auction house and the trustee right up until the winners were announced. It was only after they lost that they started throwing a stink about how the auction was ran.
Frankly, it's a bad faith argument by FAUC that's just sour grapes over losing. They were always going to challenge the results on a loss, but it does look bad for them that they didn't do that until after the loss.
Lopezes problem with the auction was mainly that he felt like the amounts were too low. He didn't really explain why he felt that and has left everything really ambiguous (not a good judge IMO). He has left the managing of infowars under the care of the Trustee and has basically given them a "fix it" order with really no clear guidelines on how they are supposed to do that (other than don't do another auction).
Appealable, yes, pretty much all orders are appealable.
Everyone has 2 weeks to file an appeal to this ruling and the Judge has given 30 days for the Trustee to figure out how to fix things.
We'll see what happens.
In any event, yes, likely we are going to see this dragged out like crazy. What's wild is IDK what happens when all the infowars funds dry up if this is stuck in litigation. Bankruptcies aren't usually drawn out like this (and it's somewhat designed to be very streamlined).
Judge Lopez's argument (as communicated by the nytimes) appears invalid.
The standard American auction is the "English Open Cry" auction. The kind of auction we expect to see at cattle auctions, estate auctions, charity auctions, etc. The English Open Cry is what is known as a "second price" auction, which means that the winning bidder will pay 1 increment more than the next highest bidder was willing to pay.
When you have a "sealed" or "secret" bid auction, the fundamental game changes to the "Vickrey Auction" which is a "first price" auction. This means that the highest bidder wins and pays the price they bid... which is expected to be the highest price at which they would be happy with the transaction.
The Sealed-Bid auction should generate a price that is greater than or equal to the English Open Cry in all situations.
The only caveat is that since the Sealed-Bid auction is always less kind to the bidder, it may not attract as many bidders as the English Open Cry.
> The Sealed-Bid auction should generate a price that is greater than or equal to the English Open Cry in all situations.
Not necessarily. In many sealed-bid auctions, bidders hope to win with a lower bid (often much lower) than they would if they were bidding against others in the same room. This is especially true if you have no idea whether anyone else is bidding on the item at all. I have placed very low bids on items in sealed-bid auctions for things I had no immediate need for, but would happily pay for if the cost was very low (and I have won many such items, sometimes because no one else even bid on them).
You're confused. It's the Vickrey auction which is second-price. English auctions are first-price. First-price sealed-bid auctions are different from Vickrey auctions.
Given how the NYT is describing the entire court case (only a level above shit slinging from Twitter), it sounds like this is less about any rationale and more dragging of the feet to get any kind of "win" out of this whole kerfluffle.
The judge basically says as much in the end:
>“You’ve got to scratch and claw and get everything you can for everyone else,” he said.
Which is a truly bizarre statement for a judge to make given the nature of this entire case. Then again, "good faith errors" certainly shows the bias of this judge here.
Parent commenter's description of the difference between an ascending bid auction and a second price auction (or Vickrey auction) is very confused. You can review the first chapter of "Mechanism Design and Approximation" for an introduction to auctions and proofs of the optimality of different auctions for different goals (e.g. the second price auction is proven to maximize social surplus): https://jasonhartline.com/MDnA/
This is almost entirely wrong in all respects. You can review the first chapter of "Mechanism Design and Approximation" for a good introduction to auction design. https://jasonhartline.com/MDnA/
From the article: "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. “It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,” Judge Lopez said. “Nobody knows what anybody else is bidding,” he added."
Wait, couldn’t this same argument be made in reverse? If the bids were open, the competing parties could simply go $1 above the highest offer, which suggest sealed bids are most appropriate to maximize the value. Auctions can’t be fairly judged in hindsight, generally speaking.
If the bids are secret and the highest bidder pays what they bid then bidders have the incentive to try to bid strategically, i.e. less than what they'd be willing to pay as long as they think that's more than anyone else would be willing to pay. Plus, if there is someone who thinks it's worth way more than anyone else, they could just place a modest bid and then if they lose buy it from the winner for $1 more than what the winner values it at anyway.
The way you can avoid this with secret bids is to specify that the highest bidder will pay $1 more than the second highest bidder no matter how high they bid. Then everyone has the incentive to actually specify the maximum they'd be willing to pay, because if the next highest bid is lower than that they still actually do want to buy it, but they lose nothing by bidding higher because they only pay a dollar more than the next highest bidder no matter what, and then you maximize bids.
But by that point you don't benefit from keeping the high bid a secret anymore, because of human psychology. Someone bids $100, is the current high bidder and thinks they're getting to buy it, then someone outbids them and loss aversion kicks in so they make a higher bid, even though the first bid was supposed to be their max.
Does it? If it's public knowledge that Alice would pay $200 and Bob would pay $100 then Alice wouldn't actually bid $200, she'd bid $101 and still win, the same result as that type of auction. If nobody knows what Alice would bid except Alice then it's even worse, because Bob thinks he could win at $60 and would rather pay $60 than $100 and Alice correctly predicts that Bob is going to do that and then wins by bidding $75. And if Bob bids $80 then Alice can still buy it from Bob for $110 but the estate is still getting $80 instead of $101.
The spirit is that a person owes families he defamed billions of dollars and that person doesn't like who they need to sell their assets to to make that money. I don't even know how and why the details of how this money is recouped is important. If I go bankrupt and need to sell my house, I sure can't stop it from being sold to Hitler or something absurd like that.
Well they are the creditors, so they put their credit up against the value of the thing. It's no different than what a bank does when it bids on a house it put up for auction after a mortgagee default. Here the only difference is that the bidding was blind, which the judge took issue with.
Because they'd be paying a dollar more than the second highest bid, not the amount of the highest bid. Frankly, I'm not sure how that could not be more clear.
> If the bids were open, the competing parties could simply go $1 above the highest offer [..]
Isn't that what you want to happen?
All the auctions I've ever participated have repeated this very process until none of the buyers are prepared to raise their bid, at which point it appears the seller has got the highest price anyone will offer.
In theory, a Second-price sealed-bid auction will produce the same price as an Open ascending-bid auction. Every bidder will offer the true value of the item to them, and the item will go to the highest bidder at the second-highest price.
But some people might think, due to human nature, that one auction or the other gets higher prices. Maybe an open bid auction gets lower bids, because interested people start lower knowing they can bid again, then back out when they see there's a lot of competition. Maybe sealed-bid auctions work better for large organisations, as getting board approval and CFO sign-off on a multi-million-dollar expenditure takes a few days. Or maybe an open bid auction gets bidders het up and excited because they're in second place and surely no matter what you've bid, you'd always bid 5% more to win - right?
None of which is backed by theory, but if it feels true to the judge - who's to say?
IMHO the main value of buying infowars, to The Onion, was the publicity and headlines. Those are harvested now. If the auction was repeated I can't imagine The Onion upping their bid.
The article suggests that this is is a first price sealed bid auction instead of a second price sealed bid auction. Skipping over the more complex nature of the Onion bid, the linked articles states "The total value of The Onion’s bid was $7 million" and "First United American Companies had a higher bid, offering $3.5 million in cash".
In some parts of the world, they auction houses in this exact manner. You show up, post a very large amount of money to prove you're serious, then everyone bids in person like an art auction.
Here in Canada, when the market is hot there are lots of auctions withe multiple buyers competing for a house. In my market (Southern Ontario), it is almost always a sealed bid situation, and winning buyers often outbid their rivals by tens of thousands of dollars.
The agents around here are fond of a process engineered to maximize the bids: If there are multiple bids that are all reasonable, they will tell the lowballs to go home, while telling those remaining how many bids are in, and offering everyone a chance to "sweeten up" before a final decision is made.
I personally would never buy a home through such a process, which tells you that I absolutely would love to sell my home in exactly this fashion should the market be hot whenever that happens.
Now that being said, I cannot say for certain whether the frenzy of shouting bids while staring your opponents in the eye will produce more money or the sealed bids will produce more money.
They could do an open run-off round of bids until they have two potential buyers, and then switch to secret ballot to get each party's highest bid I suppose?
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.
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...
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)
Letting Jones buy back his 'bankrupt' assets using money he fraudulently hid goes against the spirit of the law, even in the purchasing phase.
This guy should be living in his parents basement and barred from publishing on any significant media platforms. He's proven willing to exploit victims for personal gain to the tune of the millions of dollars.
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.
One group of creditors said they were willing to abandon some of their claims, which means other creditors would have gotten a larger share of the smaller bid, effectively making these other creditors better off.
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.
The proceeds of the sale will not come close to the value of the judgement - and Jones has acted extremely dishonestly through the process and repeatedly tried to move value from his company to his parents and other affiliate companies. I don't believe it's a fraudulent conveyance but there's a lot of awful happening here.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's a chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy estate already owns the infowars assets.
> 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.
Specifically, the reason is protecting minority and junior creditors (including the debtor when assets are in excess of debts). If nobody offered up enough cash to pay off the debts in full and there is only one creditor who would rather have the business than the best cash offer, I don't think there'd be any reason for the courts to object. The big issue is, again, minority creditors getting less than their "fair share" of the assets, along with over-compensating senior claims with junior ones outstanding.
Neither are at issue here - The Onion's offer paid more cash to the minority creditors, the majority creditor opted into the deal, and the assets are clearly worth less than the debts.
"Cash to minority creditors" doesn't matter. "Cash to the estate" is all that matters. The Onion's offer carried $1.75 million in cash to the creditors. Alex Jones's vitamin company offered $3.5 million in cash.
> 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.
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.
>It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.
you'd be surprised how many fall off from a migration. It's no different network effect from anything else. The hardcore will follow, the passive will fall off. Even a cult following like this isn't immune to this (simply more resilient).
> 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.
This is absolutely true. Other media people that lost their job or channel, handle on various platforms, typically refresh to the same number of followers within a year or two.
> Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to escape paying at least $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his repeated lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday.
> Bankruptcy can be used to wipe out debts and legal judgments, but not if they result from "willful or malicious injury" caused by the debtor, according to a decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston, Texas.
Bankruptcies have all sorts of exceptions like this for fraud, student loans, child support, unpaid taxes, etc.
It does seem likely to be true, although apparently, based on its bid, his affiliated company sees $3.5 million worth of extra value in keeping the Infowars brand and structure as opposed to going that route.
> 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.
> 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.
They were if you count the amount they claimed to be putting in from their award:
“The total value of The Onion’s bid was $7 million, including $1.75 million in cash put up by Global Tetrahedron, with the rest coming from the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, who essentially opted to put a portion of their potential earnings from a defamation judgment against Mr. Jones toward The Onion’s bid.”
Their bid was essentially "something that economically feels like $100k more than the next highest bidder to people who aren't us" which is a clever contractual construction but not an auction bid.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Debt can absolutely be sold for whatever it is worth. In this case, the Jones' debt owned by the Sandy Hook families is fairly valuable to Jones' other debtors because it means they get a bigger slice of the bankruptcy estate. Thus the Sandy Hook families can offer enough of their Jones' debt in the sale to make it more valuable. (Edit: more complicated than how I explained it because both sets of debtors include Sandy Hook families)
This isn't any more "imaginary" than money itself.
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.
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.
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.
If all parties were happy with a bid, why does it need to be run "fairly"? This isn't house auction offereing up an artifact, this is a man guilty in the court of law going bankrupt and divvying off his assets. If the people in charge of said divvying and the ones owed money are happy, who really cares?
That's confusing. We know from the reporting that some parties were happy with the bid. I guess, you mean "not all parties were happy..."?
(Please note: this is not a case of ∀x ∈ X ¬P(x) ≣ ¬∀x ∈ X P(x). ∀x ∈ X ¬P(x) means "for all x not-P", while ¬∀x ∈ X P(x) reads "there exists no x that P", i.e. there is no party that is happy with the bid, which is either a false statement or not the intended meaning. This is actually a common, but not well-known mistake, so I'm pointing it out.)
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?
I don't really know, but Elon Musk has been known to buy media companies that don't give him a good ROI, and he was making noise about putting a bid together on this one.
>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.
> It was specifically structured to give better-than-next-offer
That is the most farcical bit. When you strip away all the legalese, the offer was literally formulated as "next best offer + $". That is not a valid sealed-bid offer.
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.
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.
>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 $500M in actual cash. Then it gets divied up accordingly.
>This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.
Isn't it telling that the same judge said it was done improperly? Trustees have an obligation to follow standard practices which maximize cash flow or at least don't give the appearance of impropriety.
> Isn't it telling that the same judge said it was done improperly? Trustees have an obligation to follow standard practices which maximize cash flow or at least don't give the appearance of impropriety.
This is incorrect - trustees have an obligation to maximize the benefit to debtors. You'll see common examples of non-monetary benefit when it comes to wills - a cabinet that may be valued at 150$ but has immense sentimental value may be given to inheritors even if there is a 200k bid on it if that is what the beneficiaries all agree to.
You are treating debt discharging too literally like a numbers game - there are other important factors and in this case all the debtors were aligned and would have clearly preferred the deal with the lower monetary value.
>This is incorrect - trustees have an obligation to maximize the benefit to debtors. You'll see common examples of non-monetary benefit when it comes to wills - a cabinet that may be valued at 150$ but has immense sentimental value may be given to inheritors even if there is a 200k bid on it if that is what the beneficiaries all agree to.
Probate court is different from bankruptcy court. You can only do something nonstandard if all creditors agree. Some of these creditors are almost certainly banks that are owed money by AJ.
>You are treating debt discharging too literally like a numbers game - there are other important factors and in this case all the debtors were aligned and would have clearly preferred the deal with the lower monetary value.
There are very few sentimental factors in bankruptcy. The few that do apply (such as protections of property with little value) exist to benefit the debtor and not the creditors.
> 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
No, that's not the _only_ fair way. Suppose the $2B creditor bids $200M in cash and also agrees to forfeit their share of the proceeds from the sale. Then the $1B creditor would receive the entire $200M, which is more than the $167M they would have received from a $500M cash sale. The bid is effectively equivalent to $600M.
Isn't that what happened in the InfoWars case? The bankruptcy judge agreed that the structure of the Onion's bid was valid; he just said the auction would have continued for more rounds.
> 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.
You actually can, so long as it's the best offer for the other creditors. So long as you can come up with sufficient cash for the minority creditors you're entitled to dispose of the asset in any way you see fit. The Pennsylvania families came up with the cash (via The Onion's cash offer and structuring the payout).
My point is going over your head. Pledging money that you will never receive to get over the finish line is not the best offer. You could not consider such debt in any other purchase. Going back to that example, if the guy owed $2B pledged to buy the asset for $500M and the other one didn't even know about the auction, or instead pledged $501M, then the one who was owed less would be stealing from the one who was owed more. The fact that neither of them has any actual money is another very troublesome point on its own, as is the fact that the bidding was completely private. There might have been someone willing to pay 10x the winning bid for InfoWars in actual cash and been out of the loop.
Put it in any other context. Do you think a bank would issue a loan whose repayment was contingent on income from an individual who was seeking relief in bankruptcy? Obviously they would not. The court has an obligation to not accept fugazi money to buy real assets.
My understanding is that the other (minor) creditors would get more cash in the Onion offer because the Sandy hook reps weren’t going to take their huge cut in the event their preferred bid was accepted. That means in any other deal, the other creditors would be strictly worse off. The families would be financially worse off but they were the ones driving the decision, so they clearly felt holistically better off.
I don’t see how they shouldn’t be able to take less money themselves as long as the other creditors also got more money.
>>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.
Except what if all the creditors prefer that outcome to the "more cash" outcome? If the way it would get divvied up is $499m to you and $1m to me, vs $350m to you and $50m to me (but you get some other benefit that you prefer), why shouldn't that be accepted?
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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
Well supposedly federal govt can't intervene in state cases but the conviction against trump is at the state level, so why isn't he being sentenced? Because power isn't about rules.
As others said above, the president has certain immunities to prevent constitutional crises. But that's only for the president, and it's not part of his pardoning powers (which wouldn't work here anyway).
So why isn't he going to jail for felony falsification of business records (forget the classified records case, he's not meant to be immune from that but here we are)
My point is that power is not about what the law says, it's about what people can get away with through their relations with other people.
His conviction wasn't overturned, they are just delaying his sentencing because he's now going to be the president again. He's not doing it by any power of the federal gov't.
Exactly, there's no rule (certainly no federal rule) that says a guy can't go to jail just because he was elected president. So why isn't he? Because he has power that is not assigned to him by any law. He is a bully with a cult of personality that makes people fear him and/or act as his sycophants.
There's no fraud conviction, there can't be a pardon. There's not even fraud charges, so what would the pardon be for... I find your rebuttal confusing.
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.
Likely different legal entities. Johnson & Johnson tried to get out of the talc powder settlement by creating a different legal entity to contain responsibility and damages. A court ruled that invalid but this type of corporate entity manipulation happens all the time. With the vitamin company, it might be that Jones is not majority owner of it but the other owners are sympathetic to him. Giving Jones' ownership stake to the Infowars creditors wouldn't change anything if Jones is not the controlling owner. This is all supposition on my part and perhaps he is the controlling owner but the court for some reason decided not to include it in his bankruptcy assets. It's a weird world when we allow artificial people to exist in the form of corporations.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> They’re not as efficient as Vickrey auctions [3], but nobody actually does that.
I've always been curious -- do you know why?
It's certainly not for lack of familiarity, considering that paying the second-highest bid is basically how eBay works.
And eBay doesn't reveal people's maximum bids either. And so between that and the prevalence of last-second sniping, it essentially operates as sealed for all practical purposes.
The "winning" offer was formulated such that its cash value depended upon the next best offer. I.e., when you strip away the complexity it was of the form "next best offer + $". That this bid "won" indicates the "auction" was not a sealed-bid auction of the kind you are thinking of.
Wait no none of this is right, it doesn't make it an unsealed auction just because one or more of the bids has terms and conditions. This is how every real-estate transaction is conducted.
What makes it fine in the end is that once you collect all the bids and resolve the legal paperwork you can assign values to the individual bids and compare them which is how people who sell their homes choose what offer to go
with. And home sellers do consider intangibles and go
with lower-cash offers all the time.
I don't really understand what all the legal kerfuffle is about. Is the court really going to force the families into a sale they don't want when the sale is for their benefit however they choose to define it?
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.
> 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.
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).
> roblem with auction procedures in this case wasn't the actual auction methodology, but the lack of notice and the difficulty of submitting a bid
Which would make sense. That's not what the article quotes as the judge's reason (nor what you've said).
The quote in the article criticises sealed bids. That's mind-blowingly wrong to the point of having substance on appeal. It's so wrong I expressed scepticism it's actually the case, scepticism based on experience evaluating bankruptcy claims.
Yeah, the article is incorrect about that (like I said, sealed bids are very unusual in bankruptcy auctions, but the actual opinion cites the other stuff), and when I said that the auction procedure was farcical, I did not mean that the underlying algorithm of the auction was wrong, but that the procedures run by the auctioneer were awful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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?
I am just some guy who doesn't actually know much about this. This being the internet, though:
If I understand, it's pretty routine in real estate foreclosures for a creditor to win the auction simply by bidding the outstanding value of the debt. Thus not needing to actually come up with much or any cash. This gains the ability to use or resell the property however you want.
Bankruptcy runs by different rules than foreclosures (which is why people about to be foreclosed on often file bankruptcy). Specifically, junior creditors are protected, and everyone gets a proportionate share of the proceeds.
In a foreclosure, the senior lienholder usually gets the property and the junior lienholders either get nothing or get what’s left over after the senior creditor gets whatever they were owed.
I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal… it seems they would have had an easy time buying out the junior creditors and then getting whatever they want, although I’m also not sure why anyone would want the “infowars.com” domain and a warehouse full of vitamin pills.
> I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal…
The reason is because there were two civil judgements against Alex Jones to satisfy with the second judgement being about 27x larger than the first. As a result, it is mathematically impossible to run an auction that triggers an outcome large enough to satisfy both judgements proportionally and positively. Many members of the second judgement decided to forego any winnings from this auction so as to satisfy the first judgement positively on the condition they would earn a share of ad revenue from the intellectual property in the future. Their primary motivation was not ad revenue or any other form of income, but instead ensuring the concerned intellectual property rests with an owner not friendly to Alex Jones.
That is the reason the Onion won the auction despite offering the lower of two bids, because the larger bid did not positively satisfy the parties to the first judgement.
> I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal… it seems they would have had an easy time buying out the junior creditors and then getting whatever they want, although I’m also not sure why anyone would want the “infowars.com” domain and a warehouse full of vitamin pills.
The creditors with smaller claims hate the guts of the creditors with bigger claims, and likely wouldn't sell for any amount of money. Also, I am not sure whose claims have been decided to be senior to other claims (seniority of claims has little to do with monetary amount). Not all types of debt are equal.
Correct, although a foreclosure of a property will be affected if the owner of said property undergoes bankruptcy. (For private individuals, such as Mr Jones, some or all of their primary residential property is exempt from bankruptcy, and the foreclosure itself will be stayed until the bankruptcy is adjudicated, and, generally speaking, foreclosure will be stopped if they resume making mortgage payments, regardless of prior delinquencies.)
We are deeply disappointed in today's decision, but The Onion will continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured.
We will also continue to seek a path towards purchasing InfoWars in the coming weeks. It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome of this case.
We appreciate that the court repeatedly recognized The Onion acted in good faith, but are disappointed that everyone was sent back to the drawing board with no winner, and no clear path forward for any bidder.
And for all of those as upset about this as we are, please know we will continue to seek moments of hope. We are undeterred in our mission to make a funnier world.
A bankruptcy trustee was involved during the whole process (3rd party neutral). While the goal of increasing money to creditors here may work due to the free publicity, it harms the creditors interests who already agreed to the settlement. So you have a third party neutral trustee and the creditors who were harmed agreeing.
With that said bankruptcy judges do reject plans quite often and this is a high profile case.
It shocking to me too. I can't understand how people are 'both sides-ing' this or just supporting him under some free speech argument. Free speech has limits and a court found Jones went too far and that cost him his business.
People have been arguing the same bogus free speech point in the UK recently because people have been arrested for saying things that are anti-immigration and offensive online.
People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue. If you go around tweeting hateful things about the Royal family and the courts find you guilty, don't be surprised if that costs you your freedom. It's pretty simple.
Alex is legally free to saying whatever he wants, but he had the wrong views on Sandy Hook and his wrong views hurt the families affected, therefore he deserves to lose his business.
To be clear I haven't seen a single comment that could be charitably characterized as "supporting Alex Jones". I see a lot of comments that are pointing out that the judgment against him seems unreasonable given the damage he did to these families.
"View it for what it is: a deliberate attack on free speech. This is essentially legislating from the bench. They can't ban him from speaking but they can make it very VERY expensive to do so, and warn anyone else at the same time."
The people pointing out that the judgment is 'unreasonable' are either intentionally lying or extremely ignorant.
The context is that the judge awarded a default judgment because Alex Jones literally refused to participate in the legal system. He committed overt perjury (and was outright caught on this) and proceeded to just stop complying entirely.
If any of us received a court summons and refused to show up or defend ourselves the court isn't going to shrug and say the case goes away. In a system of law you can't just ignore the law and expect the judge to take pity on you.
Torts are not just about damage, they're also about deterrence. Jones repeatedly demonstrated in the court battle that no deterrence would work on him.
His entire business is built on this kind of defamation -- how much proceeds of this kind of business should he be allowed to keep?
Consciously or unconsciously, people begin with an unshakable feeling of “my tribe good,” then reverse engineer a justification for whatever issue is being politicized. Even if it involves defending a repugnant conman and slanderer like Jones.
It just goes to show that far too many people have no fundamental values, only political affiliations.
You're surprised? In any vaguely political thread HN is pretty much just a more well-spoken 4chan. Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content, which along with its techno-libertarian origins makes it the perfect breeding ground for fascists and pseudo-intellectualism.
It's Hacker News. I hate to say it, but this is all the website is known for at this point. Bring it up in passing conversation with the in-crowd and you'll get laughed out of the room for using "Orange Site" and fraternizing with drug-addled Elon worshipers and "soloprenuers" that beg for recognition for their dogshit SaaS product. The score has been known for years, the political leaning of Hacker News is basically the same as the "curious individuals" that inform themselves via JRE and random X accounts from Russia.
The people using Hacker News are regularly a stone's throw away from the sort of people that use 4chan. Except Hacker News has usernames and karma so it tends to create cults of personality around people that say what people want to hear.
For an entire week, I thought this was an Onion parody headline, and didn't realize the Onion _actually_ tried to buy Info Wars.
We're living in such an entertaining era.
Life imitates art.
Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd. I'm not being hyperbolic saying people would be less mad at him if he had done the shooting himself.
And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
Jones continued to inflict harm on families who’d lost children, and profited significantly from it both financially and politically. He defied multiple courts, too, so there was no question of premeditation or incapacity, just repeated decisions to cause harm year after year.
That’s the difference: true crime podcasts don’t cause harm on that scale, and few people are going to defy the authority of the legal system the way he did.
While that is terrible, I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones. Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history. Whether the public endorses that harassment is more a question of how effective the reporters are than anything else.
It makes sense that Jones would lose the case, but the scale of the judgements was eye watering and is difficult to justify. The scale of the compensation is in a different world to the amount of damage done (intentionally, the bulk is punative). That changes the nature of what is going on.
He's been ignoring the courts. I don't know what you want them to do? I guess they could put him in prison, but I'm guessing that would be considered harsh too.
Again, for the 2nd time, its not what he's done, it's that he's ignoring everyone telling him to stop, including the government. I don't know what you expect the punishment for that to be. If it were you or I we would have had our asses dragged into prison a long time ago. He's only gotten this far because of his money.
You’re welcome to try to get the laws against defamation repealed but until then there is a specific legal standard which was met in this case. If you think that’s unfair, perhaps start by asking yourself whether his lawyers made the same argument and why it failed.
> I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones
They're telling him to stop. That's what the judgement really is. He refused to defend himself in court and he's been told that he needs to stop. And you need to stop carrying water for him unless you can point to a single specific thing that the court did to him that was not fair, and making vague and uninformed statements about the big picture result doesn't count.
> Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history. Whether the public endorses that harassment is more a question of how effective the reporters are than anything else.
Do you have any examples supporting the equivalence you’re claiming? The high judgements were caused by his defiance of earlier judgements so that pattern is really what we’re looking for.
How was that harassment? They directed a baseless smear campaign which posed a significant risk to Dominion’s business. Unless we’re defining “harassment” as “accountability”, that seems fair.
I think the more important aspect is that both of these were cases where someone knowingly promulgated false information fully aware that their story was not supported by the facts. Real journalists don’t tend to do that both because it’s unethical and because it can be financially ruinous.
The situation is different in cases where the truth isn’t clear or where supporting evidence turns out to be fake because in those cases a real journalistic organization will retract or update their story. Had either of them been willing to do so, they almost certainly wouldn’t have even been sued. The Sandy Hook settlement was so large because it was obvious that Jones simply wasn’t going to leave the victims alone.
> While that is terrible, I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones.
As a single human being, he's literally not capable of suffering as much as the bereaved relatives of a classroom full of murdered children, shortly afterwards made the targets often by name and photo of the most insane people in the country.
> Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history.
Is this even an argument? They get sued all the time, and lose. They haven't ever viciously and endlessly gone after the parents of a classroom full of dead children. They did go after Richard Jewell and Steven J. Hatfill, though.
My understanding is he didn't lose the case on the merits. During discovery he was required to hand over documents from his Google account, but Google had locked his account and he couldn't get access. The judge then ruled he was in default for failing to produce.
This is obviously a massive abuse of the justice system, violating the maxim that the law does not compel the impossible. But, since the prevailing opinion (including both judge and jury) observably is "enh, fuck that guy" nobody much cares. However the shoe is going to be on the other foot sooner or later. It may be that hounding Alex Jones wasn't worth the precedent (making this style of lawfare acceptable, not an actual legal precedent) that this case sets.
I can easily imagine a case where, say, X blocks discovery in a similar way to achieve a similar outcome for someone on the left. Do we want this to be how we do things?
This is not at all what happened. I can't speak to his Google account, but Jones failed to produce text messages from his phone referencing Sandy Hook, claiming they didn't exist. Then his lawyers mistakenly sent a copy of the entire contents of his phone to the prosecution, showing that the text messages did in fact exist, and would have been found for a simple keyword search for "Sandy Hook," demonstrating that they were trying to conceal these messages from the court.
Jones lied under oath that he did not have the messages he had been ordered to provide but then accidentally turned them over, which came out quite dramatically in court:
Any time someone tells something is “obviously a massive abuse of the justice system”, ask them for details. Many people lie for political reasons knowing that their followers will not check the facts, but those claims usually fall apart as soon as you do. Lying to a judge or doing something you were ordered not to do is going to get you in trouble no matter what else is going on.
In the case of discovery about Google, note that there were two separate problems:
The first was that he lied about a spreadsheet not existing, and then the defense got evidence that it did - since that behavior was habitual, a judge is going to punish it more harshly than an isolated mistake which is promptly corrected.
The second problem was that he was trying to use the defense that he didn’t profit from Sandy Hook stories while not providing data which could have been used to test that claim. The judge didn’t jail him for that, but he wasn’t allowed to make an unverified “trust me bro” claim.
When was the last time he was profiting from Sandy Hook conspiracies? I heard him apologize for it years ago and say he doesn't believe it.
And true crime podcasts definitely do cause harm, the fans of those shows love playing vigilante detective, stalking and harassing people close to the case to get information. I remember a few years ago there was an incident where they were protesting outside of some guy's house because he was a suspect in his girlfriend's disappearance, so he couldn't even go outside. True crime is an entire industry monetizing tragedies in realtime on a scale the Sandy Hook conspiracies never came anywhere close to.
The deposition of his father clearly laid out that they saw spikes in sales when the sandy hook conspiracy was mentioned and actively sought to replicate it.
> Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is the Jones/Sandy Hook case-- like the Fox/Dominion case-- was an outlier because there is nearly never that amount of evidence to be able to pass the high bar for defamation.
So I think it's the other way around-- Jones was comically brazen in the claims he made. Hence the huge amounts in the Jones cases. (And if the podcasters are as brazen, go tell the real living people about their open-and-shut defamation cases and collect a nice finders fee for yourself. :)
Jones was also completely hostile to the courts and legal process. That will get you a larger punishment than someone who did the same actions but respected the court.
I watched some of his videos at the time and to me it seemed mostly like the exact same content that he always does. Very much not brazen claims of facts, just musing and speculating that it's all fake and the parents are smiling so they might be actors. That's it. And the entire time he was emphasizing that he doesn't know for sure and it's all theory.
he specifically called out parents by name, constantly made claims that they were obviously crisis actors, showed pictures of the parents, and did nothing when his listeners started harassing the parents daily.
The sentence you're claiming isn't hyperbolic is hyperbolic. While you can absolutely reasonably disagree with the judgement, I don't believe you can reasonably use a phrase like "seems like a nut" to summarize his part in this, if you're at all familiar with it and are being honest. "Immoral" would be the absolute minimum descriptor one could employ, even in the context of cold objectivity.
And why should we compare this to the podcast you're describing? They're two completely different kinds of immorality, and are not teams I must pick from.
As a CT native, you'll never coax an ounce of sympathy for Jones from me. He made his bed, doubled down, and faced justice. The system worked at least one time.
Nancy Grace comes to mind, who has far more reach being on national television. She made claims about people who were later found to be guilty. Her speculation pushed harassment.
Alex Jones has far more listeners than Nancy Grace has ever had. He was pulling down 8 figures selling fake boner pills and tin foil hats on his merch website.
> And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
Can you cite any data on that at all? I’m aware of the genre of podcast you’re referring to but I’ve never been aware of it even remotely being the most popular genre.
That says nothing about "women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible" even existing at all. (Although I'm sure there's some examples of it somewhere.)
Popping open Podcast Addict, the top 10 podcasts right now are:
1. No Such Thing As A Fish;
2. My Brother, My Brother And Me;
3. Planet Money;
4. Revolutions;
5. 99% Invisible;
6. Stuff You Should Know;
7. The Adventure Zone;
8. This American Life;
9. Freakinomics Radio;
10. The Rest Is History
I had to scroll to #32 to find Casefile which sorta fits your criteria, except it's hosted by a dude and I think he generally discusses older cases.
> And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
I am totally fine with convicting those for slander too. It is a pretty disgusting market.
Boeing killed people while making a not-good-enough design for a highly complex airplane system. And even though it killed 346 ppl, it continues to get millions people safely from point to point safely.
It's negligent and they need to change, but it's pretty forgivable.
Jones went on a mic and ripped false info, enriching no one but himself and grieving these families repeatedly.
This is misrepresentation, they didn't just happen to make a mistake in a complex situation. The crime was to know about the mistake and still not fix it - on purpose. The crime was to know that they should be giving people training on this system for safety reasons but they didn't anyway. Afaik it is an additional misrepresentation that the same system is now continuing on to fly. It is not, they fixed it and patched it.
Some of the issues were reported and a decision maker thought "we can get by without this". Pretty much the same reason the Challenger exploded. With a large company, there's gonna be reports about all sorts of stuff all the time, and you have to sort through the noise. They failed to do that here.
But is there any shred of doubt that no one, including the greediest most-souless bureaucrat, actually tried to make an airplane crash and kill people?
Crashing airplanes is VERY predictably bad for the stock price.
>But is there any shred of doubt that no one, including the greediest most-souless bureaucrat, actually tried to make an airplane crash and kill people?
This is not taking into account how humans are. People raise their children really badly all the time even though they know what they are doing is bad but they just don't care in the moment. Who wants a bad child? But they still make all the mistakes and end up producing bad children. Incompetence and malice are often nearly identical.
> Incompetence and malice are often nearly identical.
That is not the basis for our system of law. Intention (mens rea) matters greatly. Hence anyone who understands law shouldn't be surprised at comparing outcomes between the boeing case and the jones case.
You can disagree with it, but you really shouldn't be surprised.
I feel like your first paragraph has some slight sense, but then you demolish it with the second paragraph which just shows that you actually have no idea who Alex Jones is or what he has done
> Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd.
I'm normally extremely sympathetic to this argument, but not only was this a conspiracy theory about dead children, but it implicated the bereaved, devastated parents and all of the relatives of those children. It's so many people that you can't really make up for it, ever. There's no number of dollars or good deeds that will get him into paradise.
The fact that he still operates in much the same way as before makes me think he's blessed by intelligence agencies to use as pretense for what they want to do or as distraction from what they are doing.
I don't agree with Jones' political positions, but as someone who was not born in America, I think I can see the issue in a less passionate and partisan way. For me it is clear that the this judgment had a gigantic political vector.
I fully agree on the guilty verdict, but the sentence, frankly, was meant as a political message for Jones and everyone else on his side of the political spectrum: Stop talking the things you talk, because we are coming for you, and we get you, you won't like it.
As someone who was born in a corrupt small town in a corrupt banana republic, and was somewhat familiar with this kind of thing, it was pretty easy to see it for what it was.
It is clear that Jones and his relatives have moved money and assets around in order to shield them from the verdict. Now, money that should have been already given to the victims is being used to steal back the megaphone that caused harmed in the first place. The end effect will probably be even more subscribers and money for Jones which he will use with even less restraint since he knows there are no consequences. There are no words for the evil going on here. What recourse is left when the legal system is this broken?
That's not what this judgement says. It actually says the sale did not generate enough money for the creditors and the process should be run again. I think the Judge maybe naive in thinking that re-running an auction will generate more money (normally it will generate less, as the losing bidders will drop out) but he did not agree with Jones' claims.
The creditors agreed to and supported the Global Tetrahedron plan to purchase Infowars and settle the bankruptcy. Seems like the judge is overstepping given Delaware law on this matter.
The main reasoning by the judge seemed to be that a single round sealed bid process is unlikely to maximize the sale price which on it's surface seems pretty accurate.
So long as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it anyways.
> main reasoning by the judge seemed to be that a single round sealed bid process is unlikely to maximize the sale price which on it's surface seems pretty accurate
Did the judge argue against the single round or the sealed price?
Criticising sealed bids is nonsense. The gold-standard auction (Vickrey, or more accurately, VCG) features sealed bids. If the judge is criticising sealed bids at all, The Onion should appeal.
Criticising a single-round auction, particularly with two bidders, on the other hand, is valid.
> as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it anyways
Isn't it also meaningless if the person whose estate they're collecting is bidding against them?
I have real world experience with a lot of different auction designs being deployed, including many variations of the VCG auction.
The VCG auction is only good in theory. In practice, most people don't know how much they actually value a thing, and when they are trying to play the VCG game they typically underbid and later have deep remorse. That's the most common mistake, but I've seen plenty of other mistakes as well.
In other words, VCG auctions tend not to work well because the bidders often don't have a strong enough grasp over game theory nor a deep enough understanding of how valuable an asset is to them, and therefore the VCG usually generates suboptimal outcomes.
In my experience, the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go. Instead, you have to talk yourself into taking a risk on being left holding the bag if you choose to push the price up.
> VCG auctions tend not to work well because the bidders often don't have a strong enough grasp over game theory nor a deep enough understanding of how valuable an asset is to them, and therefore the VCG usually generates suboptimal outcomes
May I hazard a guess that you worked on low-value recurring auctions? You're describing unsophisticated bidders unwilling to expend search costs. For them, yes, "the seller has an interest in providing participants with as much information as possible about the object’s value" both before bidding starts and during it, the latter due to the impact to bids being less than the overcoming of search costs.
> the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go
Another comment highlights why this doesn't work for high-value items [2]. (They also assume bona fide bids, which isn't a problem if you can filter out shill bids.)
> May I hazard a guess that you worked on low-value recurring auctions?
It varies. In all cases, the value was below $20,000, in many cases the auction was non-recurring and >$1,000 (for example, specific web domains). I've seen enough smart people fumble a $1,000+ VCG auction that I'd be nervous to assume bidding would be any better at $100 million. I've also seen enough investors fumble $10m+ investment deals (not auctions though) to feel comfortable asserting that a higher value auction does not necessarily imply that the participants will be better at auction theory.
The exact form of the auction is really really important though. A Vickery auction is single round and sealed but is critically a second price auction so bidder are incentivized to bid their maximum because they will get the second price which wasn't the case in this auction. Without the second price you're trying to bid just enough to outbid the other party/parties which won't maximize bid size.
> Isn't it also meaningless if the person whose estate they're collecting is bidding against them?
The blatant attempts to move assets out of InfoWars during the bankruptcy is an entirely different story but that money may technically come legally from outside the estate.
> exact form of the auction is really really important though
Sure. But nobody uses Vickrey because it's impossible to explain to the public why the highest bid wasn't accepted.
> Without the second price you're trying to bid just enough to outbid the other party/parties which won't maximize bid size
Which is exactly what happens in any single-round first-price format. The only thing an open auction does is facilitate collusion. Let me repeat: for a single-round first-price auction, sealed bids are the only way to go.
> that money may technically come legally from outside the estate
It may but it doesn't. Jones saying the judge "ruled in our favour" (emphasis mine) sort of gives away the game.
There's a huge one people use all the time without knowing it, eBay is a second price auction too most people just don't use it like one. You can place a huge maximum bid and will only pay the second highest bid plus an increment. It just automatically semi-unseals bids as new bids come in so it looks a lot more like a live outcry auction.
> eBay is a second price auction too most people just don't use it like one. You can place a huge maximum bid and will only pay the second highest bid plus an increment. It just automatically semi-unseals bids as new bids come in so it looks a lot more like a live outcry auction.
This sounds small, but it's a huge difference. Let's I know that some widget is actually extremely valuable, and would be willing to pay up to $1,000. You don't know this, and are willing to pay $80. In a true second-price auction I put in $1000, you put in $80, the bids are unsealed and I pay $80.
But with the e-bay system, if I put in $1,000 at the beginning I've partially tipped my hand by bidding it up to $80. You started with some uncertainty about the value of the object, but knowing that I agree it's worth at least $80 pushes you in the direction of thinking it's worth more. This is a major advantage of sniping: by putting your bid in only at the last minute you keep others from reacting to your bid by changing theirs, and so convert the auction into something much closer to a true second-price auction.
Yes it different but it does work to increase the bid which is the goal of an auction, discover the best price an item can be sold for in a reasonably constrained time. The fact that it's worse of you as a bidder hoping to get a deal is actually good for it as an auction design.
There's also some assumptions built into these analyses that there's at least two people who have a reasonable perception of the value of an item. Things get massively more difficult to analyze when you start including changes in perceived value.
> fact that it's worse of you as a bidder hoping to get a deal is actually good for it as an auction design
The point is, in the above example, you wouldn't bid $1,000. So I will bid $50. Then $60. Then $70. Then $80. Then $90. And then, seeing the price has changed, I will stop. And wait. I am willing to pay $1,000. But it doesn't ever make sense for me to bid that.
Even in the eBay example you're betting against their being a third party that will attempt to come in with a late bid so the auction closes before you can respond. If you want the item it's still optimal to bid your maximum and allow the second price mechanism to function, if you bid $1000 and there's only one other bid of $80 (and the price increment is $10 or 12.5%) you get the item for $90 either way no matter if you bid that manually or if you placed a maximum bid. That's how a semi-sealed second price auction works (at least as eBay implements it) the next minimum bid is revealed as new bids come in that are responding like it's a live cry out auction. If there are multiple max bids it's just set to the highest second price plus the bid increment and the max bid is still hidden.
That's the beauty of the eBay system it works for people to interact in two ways, as a more boring sealed second bid system and as a live cry auction. The biggest point it falls apart is you need a certain number of people to understand the system to act rationally about it. If you only have people treat it like a live cry auction then it defaults to acting like one.
> you're betting against their being a third party that will attempt to come in with a late bid so the auction closes before you can respond
Yes. It's why people use bots, e.g. [1].
For low-value products, particularly amidst repeat auctions, the incentive to do so is small enough that one can mostly ignore it. For a high-stakes auction, you're just devolving the game into a high-frequency race.
> If you only have people treat it like a live cry auction then it defaults to acting like one
The point is it really only works as an English auction. The "sealed" bid is for convenience. (It's not really a sealed or even semi-sealed bid, it's just a dumb auto-bidding bot.) Run a major auction with this format and you'd have zero activity until the millisecond before bids were due followed by a mountain of lawsuits.
You can use bots or you can bid your true maximum and receive the best price available below it. You can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is. If all the sniping bidder are above the sealed bidders then the auction still functions to discover higher prices just not as efficiently.
> this format and you'd have zero activity until the millisecond before bids were due followed by a mountain of lawsuits.
Sure but no one does, the eBay model is a compromise to make the bidding structure more familiar to people who don't understand the second price mechanism. Major auctions don't need to make that accommodation, the audience can be relied on to read and think about the auction structure which is unfortunately not an option you can really take for a mass market tool.
> can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is
Of course you can. You repeatedly enter marginally-higher bids until you crest their limit. The only case where the auction is efficient is if the automatic bidder is the highest and someone else bids up to their maximum.
> can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is
Correct. But eBay doesn't have sealed bids. You can absolutely snipe an auto-bidder; this is like the first high-speed algorithm that was ever developed in the real markets.
> no one does
Literally pointed you to an eBay bidding bot.
> the eBay model is a compromise to make the bidding structure more familiar to people who don't understand the second price mechanism
...yes. The eBay model is a compromise that works for unsophisticated bidders and low-value auctions. eBay's model is a known-flawed model that does not "discover the best price an item can be sold for in a reasonably constrained time" [1].
> You repeatedly enter marginally-higher bids until you crest their limit.
That's not sniping. Inherent to last second sniping is you get a limited amount of chances to boost your bids, in the best case you're taking one shot at the bid to place it at the last millisecond eBay will accept your bid. You're trying to get the last bid in on an auction so no one has a chance to respond. Incrementally bidding up to find the ceiling is directly opposed to the goal of having a sniping bot.
> Literally pointed you to an eBay bidding bot.
That was talking about other auction runners using the eBay model for extremely high value items because of the complexity of execution, not about people using bots. I know people use bots it's just that to win they have to beat the bid placed by people using the second price functionality. I'm not denying their existence just questioning how effectively they actually distort the auction structure.
If a lot of different people (using different bots to avoid GIXEN's automatic mini auction) all place their maximum bids at the last second the winner is still the person with the max bid be that a bot user or a pre bidder.
The winning strategy to win that bidding war is still to place your maximum bid in the bot and if everyone does that it's just a normal sealed second price auction. The bot strategy just relies on there not being enough interest in every item and finding one where you can bid less than your maximum and still win which is also true of a pure sealed second price auction. I'm just not seeing where the strategy and outcome differ by including bots if there are second price bidders in the mix bidding their true max.
most people just don't use ... place a huge maximum bid and will only pay the second highest bid plus an increment
The reason people don't do this on eBay is because sellers can have a friend bid on the item to raise the second-place bid more than you're willing to pay (shill bidding). The Nash equilibrium for second price auctions is to only bid the maximum you're willing to pay. Bidding a higher amount leaves you vulnerable to these shill bidding tactics.
> The Nash equilibrium for second price auctions is to only bid the maximum you're willing to pay.
Of course... why would you ever bid more than you're willing to pay? Huge doesn't mean more than your maximum.
Also those shill bids are also betting on being able to perfectly find the point where they are juuuust below your max bid without knowing the actual max bids on the item at any given moment. If they fail they can not pay out but the seller is out their time and any listing fees (depending on the eBay era we're talking about). Conceivably you're still willing to pay your maximum bid the second time an item is available in most circumstances.
Even shill bidding aligns with the goal of auctions to find the maximum price for an item. The goal of the auction is to benefit the seller not the buyer's ability to get a deal. It would probably be fixable by making the bid more binding but that's a separate issue you're still paying at max your nominal maximum price if you win.
> those shill bids are also betting on being able to perfectly find the point where they are juuuust below your max bid without knowing the actual max bids on the item at any given moment
Yes. That or you use one shill to uncloak the max and then another to bid just below it. Worst case, as you said, you're only out your listing fee.
> shill bidding aligns with the goal of auctions to find the maximum price for an item
Which is why for high-value items in a system subject to shill bids, bona fide bidders don't put their actual maximum price into an unsealed (or semi-sealed) system. Which lowers the auction price.
Klemperer wrote an approachable intro to auction theory.
> multi-round or not, they should still be equivalent in expected revenue to VCG - no
VCG is second price, so we're already in a sub-optimal regime with a first-price format. (All while illustrating why Vickrey auctions don't work with unsophisictated observers. Could you imagine the shitshow if The Onion won and then didn't have to pay their bid, but Jones's?)
Given first price, I don't think the number of rounds is revenue equivalent.
> “It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,” Judge Lopez said. “Nobody knows what anybody else is bidding,” he added.
So it sounds like the judge specifically had issues with the use of sealed bids.
I thought the other reason was that some creditors were trying to use their debt forgiveness as a credit to purchase inforwars. Which obviously doesn't make sense in a bankruptcy, since the whole point is the creditors are not going to get paid back 100%.
> Which obviously doesn't make sense in a bankruptcy, since the whole point is the creditors are not going to get paid back 100%
The creditors already own the asset. The estate is selling, not Alex Jones.
If you asked every creditor which bid they preferred, which do you think they'd choose? The creditors forgoing their claims obviously prefer one. As for the rest, they'll choose the one that pays them more: The Onion's bid.
This isn't how bankruptcy works in practice, but it's a good shorthand for what the correct answer should be.
They quoted the relevant portion. The creditors do not own infowars already.
A court appointed trustee is liquidating it, the owner has not changed (and will not until it officially sells).
Certain creditors giving up some of their claim can shift more money to other creditors effectively increasing the amount paid out by the estate, thereby satisfying more creditors so it's completely kosher just slightly odd. It's unusual because most companies are just companies and the creditors have less/no emotional investment in anything other than receiving the maximum amount of money from the bankruptcy.
I don't see what emotions have to do with it. If a business has a claim for $28 million in debt against a bankrupt company with near zero cash, I could easily see them saying "we'll bid the full $28 million for the asset X". Presumably the asset X has some non-zero value. Even if comically low (like a single small office building), collecting the value of that asset is much better than $0.
Emotions come into it where some creditors are willing to forgo their portion of the sale proceeds for a particular outcome. That counts as the bid satisfying some portion of the debt and now other creditors potentially get more money from the bankruptcy. The law allows for this, banks do it all the time on foreclosure auctions splashing the bids with their outstanding loan amount making it unprofitable for others to bid and winning the house they can then sell in a regular manner.
It's the value that goes to the creditors in the bankruptcy and is the legal requirement for the bankruptcy process. Jones gets none of this money he doesn't own InfoWars since he entered the bankruptcy process.
They typically file in the United States Court for the District of Delaware, a federal court located in Delaware. Delaware law plays a significant part in these cases even though they’re in Fed court. Corporate charters, filings, fiduciary duties, property rights, choice of laws, etc etc etc are all determined by Delaware law and used in the federal court.
Federal Bankruptcy Law provides the procedural framework.
So, Delaware law does in fact have nearly everything to do with it.
> Federal Bankruptcy Law provides the procedural framework.
Federal bankruptcy law sets the substantive as well as procedural rules for bankruptcy, and its substantive provisions trump any state law, but, OTOH, state law has some role both in determining what the set of claims going in to bankruptcy are and, to the extent permitted in federal bankruptcy law, setting things like allowable personal exemptions, etc.
Yep! This is all correct. The point remains, however, that Delaware law does have a substantial amount to do with bankruptcy proceedings in Delaware, which is really the point I was responding to.
I may have been wrong to say "nothing" but from what I understand Delaware law has very little to do with it and I don't see how it would be relevant to this particular ruling, but I am always open to learning more as I find the topic of law quite interesting.
I don’t know in this case specifically. In the typical case though I’ve seen corporate charters enhance fiduciary duties, I’ve seen them specify auction procedures, I’ve seen them give certain classes certain rights, and most importantly for this case I’ve seen them define corporate governance during the auction sale.
So potentially has massive implications for the auction and its fairness.
The actual issue is that the winning bid was $7m- $1.75m cash + $5.25m in debt forgiveness. The question is whether that bid is higher than the competing $3.5m all-cash bid.
That $5.25m debt forgiveness would have to be valued at $1.75m or more for the winning bid to actually be higher, but if other creditors are assuming that they will have losses of higher than 66% then the $3.5m all-cash bid would actually be better for other creditors.
FUAC's offer was all cash. The Onion offered less cash, but offered other incentives (AIUI, a share of whatever revenue they make from Infowars in the future). Saying that The Onion's bid was lower requires you to put a dollar value on those other incentives. The fact that the two creditors (read: victims' families) that would benefit from those incentives were willing to sacrifice some of the debt they were owed so they could benefit from those incentives suggests that at least _they_ think those incentives were worth more than the cash upfront, and the amount of debt they were willing to sacrifice gives you an implicit baseline for that dollar value.
Given the site we're on: it's like saying that an offer with a lower base salary but higher equity is automatically a worse offer than a bigger salary with no stock.
> a share of whatever revenue they make from Infowars in the future
What is that realistically? They said they will turn it into gun safety information. How does a gun safety information site make money out of an audience of people expecting a guy shouting about conspiracy theories?
I don't know what it is. It's an investment, it carries risks with it. That said, if I were one of the Sandy Hook families, turning Infowars into a gun safety site would hold more value than any money you could pay me. Classic case of "maximising shareholder value" not being the same as "maximising revenue".
What that is realistically is irrelevant to the value to the bankruptcy estate - the value to the estate is the amount of debt those creditors are willing to forgive in return for those risks.
The idea that Global Tetrahedron would generate revenue from InfoWars is a farce. Jones is InfoWars. Any market value assigned to InfoWars without Jones explicitly involvement is a farce. Even a non bankruptcy sale of InfoWars would require him to participate in the business for an extended period of time. Even then, it'd just be some investor bankrolling Jones.
Yes, that's precisely what I mean. It might or might not be a bad bet, but the Sandy Hook families are just as entitled to take that bet as anybody else. The idea that it's farcical to entertain any offer that doesn't involve putting Jones back in charge leads you down a really weird road.
That seems true for any attempt to continue using the IP for the same thing. Turning it into a parody of that thing might have an audience (and therefore produce ad revenue), would not seem to need Jones involved, and be something for which Global Tetrahedron seems well resourced.
It's complicated - it went to the bidder that would result in the two largest debtors being the happiest with the outcome but that bidder didn't bid the most money in a regular manner.
The structure of the bid was quite complex but essentially the largest debtor agreed to enlarge the share the second largest debtor would receive by supplementing it from their own share due to the awards in the two court cases being so drastically different (basically the largest debtor decided to decrease their own share in that specific bid to supplement the second largest debtor) - this bid was the one that the primary debtor prefers and would award a lot more value to the secondary debtor than the bid that was, on paper, larger.
There are some good detailed analyses of the arrangement out there that would give you a much better understanding than I can communicate second-hand - I'd suggest the overview by LegalEagle[1], personally.
Just navel gazing here maybe there is case precedent or law here.
The debtor generally deserves their case to be discharged resolved liquidated closed and done forever.
Paying ongoing reparations in royalties or whatever the onion proposes doesn’t accomplish this. Alex Jones himself could convert his case to a chapter 13 and set up a “repayment” plan based on his own anticipated/potential earnings from his own business. It would possibly even be higher, infowars intended audience is probably more profitable than people laughing at infowars on Ben Collins bluesky feed.
The people who got a personal judgment aren’t made whole by a promise of future restitution by someone purchasing his business assets.
What if the onion went bankrupt next year and said oh we’re not going to pay that anymore?
That would be an interesting case to test: a person being relieved from a fraud or criminal tort, as it’s handed off to a third party buying their business, who themselves didn’t commit fraud or a criminal tort and merely became insolvent which is dischargeable.
In the case where the “creditors” own the asset to settle their claim, that’s another story, whether they make $1 or a billion dollars disposing of it is no longer the debtors problem
In the same way that returning my smashed up uninsured car to a secured lender doesn’t make them whole for my discharged loan either.
>Paying ongoing reparations in royalties or whatever the onion proposes doesn’t accomplish this.
Sure it does, the Onion would be paying the royalties, Alex Jones already doesn't own it, it's essentially owned by an estate that is selling it off to cover Alex Jones' debts.
> went to the bidder that would result in the two largest debtors being the happiest with the outcome but that bidder didn't bid the most money in a regular manner
The creditors own the asset. If every dollar the creditors are owed voted, which bid would they choose?
The onion bid - by far. If the bid was chosen by creditors weighted by owed value the Connecticut families would solely dictate the terms as they are owed more than 90% of the value resulting from this auction.
If this is the case, dollars voted are less important than outcome value to the creditors. It is their asset, no? They are assigning value and signaling accordingly.
> dollars voted are less important than outcome value to the creditors. It is their asset, no?
Sure. I’m trying to approximate a metric that gives their weighted interest. My point is the owners of the asset are selling it, and it seems their interests are obviously maximised by one bid.
That's incorrect - it's a lot of text to say it went to the second highest bidder. The onion bid was the one that provided more value to the creditors.
From what I've read, it's not incorrect. Orthogonal valuations are not part of the bid value. This is why The Onion was second (the winner). It was not the highest bid (the considered part). The end.
The Judge has decided that's unfair, likely due to some bias (intellectual, political, etc.)
This is the comment I was looking for. He said he was going to intervene and something to the effect of “fix it.” This seems like a logical outcome of that statement.
You know, if Elon buys it at the same levels of inflated values he did for Twitter so that the creditors get paid, I'm kind of okay with that. Just kind of. His fix will not go to Jones. Jones is not going away however this ends. Just the brand. He can create a new brand.
>You know, if Elon buys it at the same levels of inflated values he did for Twitter so that the creditors get paid,
He paid $44B. He probably could have got it for less at the time, but if you think it's not worth that, I'm not sure what to tell you. It's literally where all news gets broken. All of it. And he's using it to influence global politics.
Inflated values was Musk's own words, not mine. To the point, he was forced by a court to honor his original higher price than what he wanted to pay after re-evaluating it. Not sure why you're quibbling over the fact that everyone thinks Musk paid an inflated price.
> He paid $44B. He probably could have got it for less at the time, but if you think it's not worth that, I'm not sure what to tell you.
It's indisputable that Twitter was worth $44B at the time of the sale because by definition the price of something is what the buyer and seller agree to perform the transaction.
What's also indisputable is that even Elon Musk was refusing to pay that much for Twitter and tried to back down until he was sued to force him to put his money where his mouth was.
Jones will create his own new brand once this is settled.
So it is more of a question to the bankruptcy court itself, as I would agree that there's no value in Infowars without Jones. So my opening bid to the court is $1.
Will the losing bidders drop out, or not? In a sealed bid you have to guess what others will bid - you want to bid $1 more than your competitors (or if you will lose the bid make your competitor pay as much as possible). The judge is saying because the bids were seals losing bidders had no clue what their correct bid is and some are likely to have bid less than they would have in open bidding.
> judge is saying because the bids were seals losing bidders had no clue what their correct bid is and some are likely to have bid less than they would have in open bidding. Who is right I don't know.
Sealed-bid auctions are incredibly common across markets [1]. Real estate. Corporate mergers.
Note, too, that an English auction is revenue equivalent to a second-price sealed-bid auction [2], and here we had a first-price sealed-bid auction with two bidders.
There may be valid reasons to challenge this auction. Sealed bids is absolutely, definitively not one.
I am not disagreeing with anything you have said here. Sealed-bid is common. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't. It is debatable if it is better or not.
No, it really isn’t. Not with two bidders. The moment the first party announces their bid you have perfect collusion (if the second party, rationally, runs out the clock) or a stalled auction (if running out the clock is impossible, thereby always allowing someone to always claim they’ll bid better).
you need a lot more than 2 bidders for the theory to hold. Repeating the auction just seems pointless, but another avenue could be for the assets to not be sold, and the claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business. Then over time they can potentially see a better recovery than what they are getting from a sale.
> you need a lot more than 2 bidders for the theory to hold
Wrong. Vickrey auctions are well studied in single-item auctions even with two bidders [1]. (They perform between 4/3 and 2 compared to an optimal omniscient auction. Not solved. But not unstudied.)
> claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business
This is Chapter 7. The bankruptcy estate already legally owns the asset, not Jones.
You can test this in boardgames about auctioning: See Modern Art, a game about profiting from art, where you have multiple forma of bidding. Part of the game is to figure out when each auction will provide the most money.
Blind bidding doesn't let people improve their bid, but it also lets someone bid much higher than the second best bid, so it can be extremely profitable in some situations. Compare to a version of said auction where you bid only once, but where the winner will only pay the second best bid plus one.
Uncertainty makes bids go up. Introducing the possibility that perhaps there might be a second round after a bid turned out to be too low reduces uncertainty.
Imagine game theory dynamics in poker if an unhappy player could say "well, come to think of it, I guess I did not really want to see, I'd rather fold"
In a single round sealed bid auction, it’s equally likely that a winner will have bid more than they would have in open bidding since they only get one shot to name a price.
Taking the judges decision at face value here is fundamentally the problem - because it relies largely on Alex Jones as an arbiter of reality.
The judge seems to take Jones, the guy who lost the auction, as the arbiter of what happened. That is a problem and not just because of the strong potential for bias, and not just because the trustee would be a more obvious source of truth - because he ran the auction. Its a problem at a deeper level because the judge seems set on taking Alex Jones as a good faith actor. Every step in the court process has shown that not to be true. We aren't here randomly and this bankruptcy doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Even setting aside that nonsense. THe judge seems confused on the difference between money and value. Thats the type of thing an undergrad gets wrong.
> I think the Judge maybe naive in thinking that re-running an auction will generate more money (normally it will generate less, as the losing bidders will drop out) but he did not agree with Jones' claims.
I no longer remember the title of the paper but it was on the Gordon-Brown-era spectrum auctions. Basically if bidders can obtain information about each others preferences other than via the auction - or in some cases even via the auction - the expected price is lower. I think it applies when a limited number of bidders are interested. If Elon is interested then all bets are off :-)
This seems to me like a victim of attempted murder suing the assailant into bankruptcy, where one of the assailant's main assets is a really expensive gun, and the assailant is still saying how much they'd like to kill the victim with that gun.
Surely there must be a legally viable way to resolve such a bankruptcy that doesn't involve the assailant buying back the gun with funds raised from friends.
You speak practically. Unfortunately the courts do not, and as a result, the courts are suffering a deficit of trust and confidence, nationally.[1] The problems transcend one case and unfortunately they do not point clearly to one answer or a single set of answers. Is it the system? Is it the laws? Is it the people? Why do we get bizarre elevation of form, and results wholly devoid of justice?
They rejected a plea deal. That almost never happens. He was 100% guilty of some things, but they wanted to drag out the whole process for publicity rather than to actually do some semblance of 'justice'.
And some of these incoming people threatened to keep going after him just to inflict pain on his father.
These are no longer the party of Romney and McCain. "The cruelty is the point".
> Comparing one guy who was in the hot seat only because of his surname
There exists boatloads of concrete evidence Hunter Biden was guilty of several categories of crimes, related to drugs, corruption, illegal firearms and child prostitutes.
There’s a reason he had to be pardoned by Joe, right? He essentially created a “the full laptop” pardon, complete unprecedented.
Any other person guilty of half these things would be in for life.
You got it backwards. He didn’t get a shit storm due to his last name. He got a free pass due to it.
The only reason Biden pardoned his son was that Trump explicitly said he was going to use the DoJ for a punitive witch-hunt. No father would ever subject their child to that.
If Harris had won, Biden would not have pardoned Hunter. Likely Harris would've pardoned him in a year or two after he'd seen prison.
>He was fined over a billion dollars, in what world is losing a billion dollars no consequences?
Parent’s point is that the amount of the fine doesn’t matter if he is able to avoid paying it. It could have been a quadrillion. A fine only matters if you actually have to pay it.
On an average-person-level, some municipalities nearby me have decided to not basically not do anything about parking fines. As a result, there are vehicles that over ten thousand dollars of fine. But they are still allowed to renew their registration and drive their vehicle. So it’s just a made up demerit.
Reminds me of that Russian court that recently fined Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Funnily enough this was along similar lines to the Alex Jones case but in reverse.
He was fined a billion dollars, but it will never be collected, he never lost a billion dollars. With this decision all his debts are pardoned and he gets to keep his megaphone, that is very "no consequences".
America was founded with a constitution that guarantee's citizens a megaphone as part of a list of inalienable rights (God given per words in the constitution). Bankrupting Jones won't remove his ability speak or muzzle him and it's more than likely only going to give him more of an audience. He'll still be able to voice his performance art about growing babies-in-cows-for-25-years and gay-frogs. He'll more than likely struggle to sell his seeds and end-of-times nonsense and he's probably been debanked. But megaphone wise he'll be louder than ever.
I was always under the impression that the performance art he did with the frogs was in reference to Chlorpyrifos. And I am in concert with Alex Jones here. I agree with him. This crap is not good, is banned throughout the world, and is a mammalian neurotoxin.
But you and I both know he crosses the line (and enjoys doing so) from authentic to clown. He'll bedazzle a libertarian and country boy with quirky strange perspectives that have a kernel of truth and then drag them down into the dark ass netherworld he's living his life in. He spins people up and inflames their amygdala's and connects the dots to some dark metaphysical Ba'al. But then he still comes back around and sells you some seeds and some product to stock your nuclear fall out shelter. He's one part performance artist one part grifter. But he crossed a third rail when he tried pulling the parents of a school shooting into his bi-polarish world. Bottom line with a guy like Alex Jones is that he's always going to connect the natural failure-state of a system (FDA regulatory capture) to some fever dream Ba'al conspiracy vs acknowledging that humans and their systems are flawed and that the natural state of a government is one in which it is picking winners and losers (cronyism) and it's been that way in his country since Washington's soldiers and officers mutinied over pensions. https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-source-collect.... That didn't need the illuminati becuase, like the FDA, it's the natural mode of humanity and a system to fail.
He wasn't fined. He had a judgement for damages against him. They are different things with a similar outcome (he's out a billion dollars) - accuracy is important.
Also - until he actually pays any of that billion dollars, there have been no consequences.
Additionally, it's important to highlight that he refused to properly comply with the legal process - so it was a default judgement. This is essentially unheard of due to how unwise it is.
We can consider his non-compliance an investment in his audience. By refusing to comply, he signals his supporters that the lawsuit is unfair persecution. And they believe him.
His lawyer already stated “Finally, a judge followed the law.”.
They won a defamation lawsuit when what he did was way more than just defamation. He deliberately made the families' lives hell, and did that for profit.
Now that it's public knowledge how low the bids were, a re-auction might attract many more bidders and raise a LOT more money for the creditors. It is certainly not an asset with any appeal to me, but a talented brand and e-commerce operator can likely generate a river of cash flow from the IP/audience for sale here.
Alex Jones owes a lot of money after the lawsuits against hi , if he was hired back at Infowars everything he made would be clawed over. Second, Alex Jobes is what his followers are interested in, if he still has any followers left. Anyone else who buys this asset will not be able to extract any value from it.
This is all totally ridiculous. The assets are only worth a large amount when run as a disinformation outlet for Russian/extreme-right propaganda. Since no buyer is going to do that (see earlier, that gets you sued), the assets aren't worth much.
I really don't understand how a judgement this large can be reasonable in a case where nobody has had his house burned down.
A billion dollars is ten billion crowns, that's 10 000 million crowns, or around 5 000 apartments.
I don't understand how 5 000 apartments can be a judgement handed out to an individual over something he says. It doesn't really matter what he says, when it's this kind of huge amounts. One can't fine somebody the value of an entire town unless he's done destruction of that order, or at least a fraction of that order.
Stealing from an earlier comment of mine [1] in case you want to read the comments.
Alex Jones declared in court that his show reaches about a hundred million people. If that's true then he's paying $10 for every person who heard him defaming the families of dead children.
This would be the same principle as those fines in Nordic countries sometimes that depend on how rich someone is. If you can influence one hundred million people and use that power in a criminally irresponsible way, you get a proportionate fine.
Yeah, we don't have that in Sweden except for criminal acts, and then the fines are a certain number of days of your income as a substitute for imprisonment.
In civil cases our judgements are usually not enormous.
I don't feel that your reasoning above makes the judgement more reasonable. Maybe he does reach that many people, but he obviously makes nowhere near that amount of money and it's out of line with other defamation judgements.
> it's out of line with other defamation judgements.
This point made me curious so I quickly looked around. Fox News paid a $787.5 million settlement [1] for making false claims about Dominion. Given that this happened as the trial was about to start, it's reasonable to assume that Fox News expected to lose even more if the issue went to trial. And that's for a party that arguably would have followed court orders, something Alex Jones refused to do.
Next in line is Rudy Giuliani, who was ordered to pay $150 million for defaming two election workers [2]. If Alex Jones defamed 12 families then it comes out roughly the same.
The acts of defamation were extreme, clear cut, repetitive and devoid of remorse. I for one like knowing that if someone ruins my reputation with cruel lies in such a malicious and relentless way that they may face extreme consequences.
How about in a case where libel was relentlessly thrown at families over the course of years, on one of the internets largest and most engaged audiences, leading to harassment, threats, and assault? What should the judgment be for that?
I emphasized that it wasn’t just over words said, but the frequency of, audience size, and actual real world harm that’s taken place as a result. And as other commenters have pointed out, he acted in contempt of the court on several occasions
The same way that big media organizations get away with this in court.
"This content is entertainment and there's no way that any reasonable person could construe this information as facts." If MSNBC, CNN and Fox News can get away with this argument every time they are sued, I don't see how InfoWars doesn't.
But then again, court cases aren't about facts or truth.
> But then again, court cases aren't about facts or truth.
My sibling in Christ, Jones is paying because he fucked around with courts. He was told to stop by court, and he didn't. He had a chance to defend himself, and he passed on it.
That's not true either though. The default judgment was for not complying with the discovery process to the satisfaction of the court. Other options like perjury charges were available to the court, but the court chose the nuclear option to default against Jones.
Also in many cases courts will allow you to walk back from the circumstances that ended up with a person in default and to proceed with a fair trial. I even have direct experience with this in a foreclosure/foreign-judgments case.
The court could have allowed Jones to correct the financial and web-analytics records and proceed, but it didn't.
I'm not going to dig up the transcripts, but I was following this pretty closely when it happened. If memory serves right, Jones was given several chances to comply with discovery requests and was constantly attempting to misdirect and otherwise disrupt the proceedings. It's not like the court balked at the first weird thing the defense did and immediately entered into a default judgement. I believe the default judgement is the only thing that makes any sense in this case. The courts aren't there to play games with people like Jones.
edit: I dug up the judgement anyways. Take a look and tell me if any of this isn't reasonable. How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?
> The Court now finds that a default judgment on liability should be granted. The Court finds that Defendants’ discovery conduct in this case has shown flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rules. The Court finds Defendants’ conduct is greatly aggravated by the consistent pattern of discovery abuse throughout the other Sandy Hook cases pending before this Court. Prior to the discovery abuse in this case, Defendants also violated this Court’s discovery orders in Lewis v. Jones, et al. ... and Heslin v. Jones, et al. .... After next violating the October 18, 2019 discovery order in this case, Defendants also failed to timely answer discovery in Pozner v. Jones, et al. ..., another Sandy Hook lawsuit, as well as Fontaine v. InfoWars, LLC, et al. ..., a similar lawsuit involving Defendants’ publications
Parties play games in cases of this nature all the time. Court battles like this can be bitter.
Perjury is a criminal charge. Contempt is an option to. Judges use the lever of jail time to deal with situations like this all the time (again, direct experience here -- a surrogate court judge put two 70+ year old ladies in Rikers for a month for failing to comply with the court repeatedly over years). Going to default was exceptional behavior that nobody shed a tear for because it's Alex Jones.
Edit: To answer your question
> How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?
If you're looking to make a political statement, sure none.
If you're looking to have a fair trial, there's still steps A, B and C.
Even the fact that he had to fight all those cases for the same thing separately is a deliberate step to fuck him. Then the court treating giving the same data in each trial as a separate offense is certainly cherry-picking.
I'm not really complaining though because the concept of a fair trial does not exist. Civil or criminal. Do whatever you can not to end up in court. It always boils down to who has the most resources and the appetite for battle. Some pockets (like the state's) are near-infinite.
>given several chances to comply with discovery requests
The Jones side claims that these discovery requests were for documents that don't exist. The linked judgement provides no detail on what the specific discovery requests were that went unanswered.
Do you know what the discovery requests were for specifically?
But I know that "that document doesn't exist" is a valid response to a discovery request. Silence is not a valid response, even if the document doesn't exist.
(If one side falsely claims the document doesn't exist, the other side then can present evidence to the judge that the document does in fact exist, and that the first side is withholding evidence. If you play that game and get caught, various bad things can happen to you. The judge can look more skeptically at everything you say thereafter, the judge can rule that the other side is entitled to assuming the contents of the document are whatever would be most damaging to your side's case, you or your lawyers can be fined, and your lawyers can be disbarred. Judges deal with this kind of stuff all the time; detecting and blocking such games is a major part of what they do.)
The judgement document does not go into any detail therefore we don't know whether the Jones team responded with "these documents don't exist" or not. If that was their position, why wouldn't they have responded to that effect? There would be no motivation to do otherwise.
skulk updated their post upthread to include an actual quote from the judgment. That says quite enough. It doesn't have to list specifics of a repeated, flagrant, bad-faith pattern of attempts to disrupt discovery; the rest of the record of the case will do so, in detail after detail after detail.
I haven't really tried since the SCO v. IBM days. But for a federal case, you used to be able to go to the courthouse and ask to look at the case file. You could make copies of anything you want (at their rates per page). Or you could use PACER to view it, if you had an account.
I suspect things are more on line these days rather than less, but I haven't tried lately. If nothing else, you should still be able to see everything on PACER. (If they are online instead of in PACER, there may be a delay time - three months, maybe? But for this case, that shouldn't matter.)
I have never, ever seen a judge use contempt or a default judgment (against someone represented in court) without directly threatening to use that power first.
>but the court chose the nuclear option to default against Jones.
Institution that is a fundamental part of the establishment and status quo jumps at the chance to shit all over someone who's shtick is undermining public trust in the establishment and status quo. Water is wet. More news at 11.
Yeah, I think the part that makes this so controversial isn't that they exercised their discretion to screw him, which is absolutely expected, but that the court chose a total amount so large as to be newsworthy and garner sympathy for Jones and make people question the actions of the court by itself. The idea that some singular kook running a talk show could get a judgement that we rarely ever see levied upon major corporations that pour far more man hours into far more definable evil makes people who've never heard of the guy ask WTF.
If that's the case, I sure hope nobody finds my post history from my teen years, or the history of anyone who was a rebellious teen on the internet in the 2000s.
Alex jones sold something like $165M in supplements in the 3 years preceding this case… this is somehow the opposite of people complaining that judgements against FB are too small based on the Revenue.
So you're saying the legal system should hinge on the judgement of what random people believe is "crazy" rather than judges, juries, laws, etc. One opinion should outweigh everyone and everything else?
It was a default judgement. No trial took place and there was no ability for the jury to see evidence from both sides. The monetary amount was absolutely based on feelings.
Yes, but a billion dollars. It's 30x the sale price of Minalyzer, a very cool Swedish firm which was bought by Veracio.
It's a level where, when it is an international case, it makes sense for states to get involved with diplomatic pressure. Surely your legal system must be more reasonable than this, because if it's like this, how can it function?
It wasn't a billion dollars for a single thing, it was awards to 15 different defendants, ranging from ~30-120 million each.
More importantly, you're missing that this was a default judgment - Jones didn't defend himself, so the award is kind of the theoretical maximum. The results aren't comparable to regular court cases where both sides make their case.
Why should the system accommodate people who refuse to defend themselves?
I understand that in a system like Russia where dissidents face made-up charges and their attorneys are harassed by the state. But Alex Jones isn’t in that kind of position at all. He has no problem getting legal representation.
The default judgment basically means he admitted guilt by his refusal. That was his choice.
Nonsense - a legal system must apply the law. Also, Jones wasn't "weird or peculiar" - he repeatedly disobeyed and misled the court.
This is like a soccer match where one team won by fifty goals, because the other team repeatedly committed fouls and then left the pitch, and you're arguing that the referee should disallow some of the goals because you feel in your gut that fifty is too many.
It must give reasonable results, and a 1 billion judgement against individual over something like this is not.
That procedure or rules have been followed is no reason to accept an absurd outcome. An absurd outcome is rather a reason to reject a set of rules or procedures.
And this absurd outcome is partially due to a flagrant disregard for the sets of rules and procedures that came before this case.
The Knowledge Fight podcast covers this case in its entirety and it's clear that Infowars et al. has toed the line of criminal to delay and deny justice to the victims. The legal system hit the end of the road and said "everything owed to the victims or everything Infowars has" and this is the result.
But the ruling was for compensatory damages - that is, the compensate the victims. It wasn't a punitive damages - which would make more sense - basically "You don't get to have your infowars any more".
Compensatory damages is making the claim that the sandy hook families actually suffered $1B in damages.
Same reason Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison for conspiracy charges and CCE. Unusually harsh for those convictions and a first time offender. The point is, as cliche as it sounds, to send a message.
Because damages are easy to calculate - how much money did Jones make from intentionally lying about the victim? That money is the result of him selling their repuation without their consent - the market decided what the value of that act was.
Well partly true... The part where no one wants to watch your videos seems extremely reasonable.
Unfortunately you veer way out of reasonableness when you compare the crime of arson with the civil law of defamation. Criminal law and civil law are very different things... So much so that im not even sure what you're trying to get at with your analogy.
You do seem upset about it though, and that does make sense... I'd imagine the world would be scary without even a basic understanding of the rules that you're held to. Fortunately this information is readily available... Some review material for junior high civics classes will cover most of what you need to know, and should only take you an hour or two to go through.
This is kind of bullshit. The Sandy Hook families were a part of The Onion’s bid. They were clearly ok with it.
The court knows it can’t sell it back to Jones or a proxy of, but this decision also allows Jones to continue as if he hadn’t sold. And I think that’s what they’re aiming for
United States Bankruptcy Judge Christopher M. López was appointed to the United States Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of Texas, effective August 14, 2019. Judge López was sworn in by United States Circuit Judge Gregg Costa on Wednesday, August 14, 2019.
Yes absolutely. Being found not guilty of a crime or being pardoned has no bearing on the evidence that exists which is presented in a separate civil case against you.
There’s no double jeopardy in a civil case - it’s a matter of if someone has a claim of damages.
It's not about pardoning, it's about what US bankruptcy trustee thinks is ok or not ok. Had this happen under Trump administration, I would assume that the trustee would not even allow such a deal to go ahead in the first place.
Trump, nor any other president, can eliminate the court's decision. A president's power would be limited to appointing judges in open positions, so potentially the responsible appeals court (up to the SCOTUS) could be influenced, but not controlled.
The elected government isn't making this decision anyways, this is in a court in front of a judge (one previously appointed by the president-elect, no less).
I posted the same news 24 days ago, it got downvote-brigaded by malicious actors (at the same time they were upvote-brigading fake news that he lost InfoWars to The Onion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160692
>After Jones refused to cooperate at trial, judges in Connecticut and Texas found him liable by default, and juries then awarded the families more than a billion dollars in damages, which Jones is still appealing.
Default judgements usually occur when the defendant doesn't show up. Was this the case?
I haven't been following this much but I suspect the billion dollar settlement will be overturned on appeal as being excessive. They're trying to get what they can while they can.
"A three-judge panel of the Connecticut Appellate Court found that a jury's October 2022 decision to award $965 million in damages plus attorneys fees and costs to families of the shooting's victims was not unreasonable given the mental anguish they suffered due to the lies by Jones about Sandy Hook."
They found fault with a smaller portion of the whole award, and even there not because it was found to be excessive: "the judges found fault only with a portion awarding $150 million in damages under a state unfair trade practices law, finding that should be thrown out because it did not properly apply to the facts of the case."
The damages seem excessive to me. If he were the shooter, it would be justified, but he was not. I'm surprised the appellate court upheld it. Don't get me wrong, what Jones did was pretty horrible, especially after having just lost their kids right before Christmas. The presents were still under the tree. I couldn't imagine, but he wasn't the shooter.
If it stands, it would also set a pretty bad precedent. Trump could sue MSNBC for $1B for their RussiaGate reporting. Gaetz could sue ABC for $1B their View reporting, etc. They would be effectively shut down.
Or maybe it would be good. It would force news organizations to not be so sloppy.
> Because they are usually paid in excess of the plaintiff's provable injuries, punitive damages are awarded only in special cases, usually under tort law, if the defendant's conduct was egregiously insidious.
Jones had a default judgement against him because he repeatedly failed to comply with court orders and discovery. It probably didn't help that he openly declared on his show that his idiotic behavior was a clever plan to fool the courts... apparently a couple million fools can't keep a secret.
So, I dislike Jones and think his shows are BS, but how can he be held responsible for the actions of his listeners? I haven’t heard it mentioned that he asked his listeners to actually reach out to the Sandy Hook families and harass them.
This. A core part of defamation cases (especially from a damages point of view), is showing that the false statements caused harm, and that's generally by way of those statements influncing other's beliefs and actions (apart from harassment, this could also take the form of people being unwilling to work with/provide a service to the defamed party because of said statements).
(Note that it's important that the statements are false, and depending on some details, that either they were known to be false at the time, or that there was a reckless disregard to the truth, i.e. no effort was made to determine if they were true or false. If you state something that is true, or is false but you had good reason to believe is true, or that is merely an opinion, then it's not defamation even if someone harassess them or worse)
Jones was never technically tried for anything. He refused to participate in the trial in a meaningful manner and had a default judgment against him instead.
Thank you. Can you elaborate? Wouldn’t jones stating garbage like the shooting didn’t happen etc. be opinion? How were his statements defamation ? I missed where he defamed the families as I don’t listen to his shows.
IANAL, but the semantics of opinion vs fact are typically tangential to the court's determination of defamation. However, in many cases it's a matter of framing: "I think that ..." prefixing a statement can carry a lot of weight versus presenting it as a fact.
I don't think anything can ever happen in the US -- that's part of the First Amendment.
I do think there should be some other way that would lead to Alex Jones lose his audience. But I don't see anything happening yet.
Trump and Elon are not nearly as bad as Alex Jones (arguably), and lots of people don't like them, but they have an audience, lots of other people like them, support them and send money to them. If they are not held responsible for things they say, if Trump is aquitted of January 6th, I don't think people should expect much to happen.
"Refuse" is an action verb, "Dislike" is a stative verb. The infinitive phrase ("to allow") serves as a complement to the verb "refuse," forming a grammatically correct structure. refusare = deny.
Not surprised. The deal was on shaky ground -- kind of a secret deal without a process to include all potential buyers. The Onion could still have been the winner in a more public, transparent bidding process, but they didn't do that. Procedural correctness is important, otherwise you would see this, or in some other case, entire convictions being overturned, which is the opposite of what you want to achieve.
The deal wasn't shaky. It was an auction where there were only two potential buyers who actually rocked up. It wasn't secret, it was public. It was issued by a court, including a process where bidders had to submit offers before a deadline. [0]
ThreeSixty Asset Advisors ran the process. As they often do. Tranzon Asset Advisors assisted, as they often do. There were confidentiality agreements and sealed bids... But that's the normal process for selling off assets through a court.
A sealed bid is designed to avoid negotiation, and other processes more easily manipulated by bias, unconscious or otherwise. The bids are unseen between the buyers, and opened at the same time.
There were a "large number" of interested parties before the deadline. However, most pulled out and did not submit a bid before the deadline. Leaving only two.
Some potential bidders, like The Barbed Wire, stated that they pulled out because they simply couldn't afford the expected sale price.
All of this was the exact same procedure for other forfeiture assets.
The Judge did not find any wrong doing by the buyers, but rather lamented that the final sale price was too low. That's it. Not a procedural stuff up. That was followed correctly.
> "I don't like second-guessing trustees," the judge said, but that is exactly what he did.
> "It's clear that [U.S. bankruptcy trustee Christopher Murray] left a lot of money on the table," Lopez said, adding that he thought the process was "doomed" the moment Murray decided to cancel a live auction and call for sealed "best and final" offers instead.
The first auction was illegal and this article should be seen as the mea culpa. The families bid the theoretical future earnings of jones instead of actual money. The trustee secretly accepted, but had to walk it back when it was exposed.
It's like bidding on a foreclosed house with $0 but beating everybody because you say you're going to rent it and pay back the bank with that money.
All: if you're going to comment here, please review the site guidelines and make sure to stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
There's way too much nasty dross in this thread. No, the topic does not make that ok. As you'll see when you review the guidelines, "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://archive.is/8q8m8
Am I missing something or does this NYT article not actually say what the judge based his decision on? That would be an important piece of information to have when deciding whether the decision was good or not.
This is the legal pretext, which appears about 2/3 of the way through the article:
> 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.
> auction failed to maximize the amount of money
I don't run auctions but something tells me there's a lot of research behind them that goes into optimizing for this precise thing. It's wild that the judge is disregarding the expertise of the person who was appointed by another judge to run the auction without asserting that the person is not qualified to run it.
It is quite wild and frankly just shocking.
The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale.
What's even more crazy about this ruling is he's told the trustee to come up with an alternative solution, that doesn't involve a new auction... But like no other guidance. That leaves the Trustee in a weird situation where the judge has said "I don't like what you did, fix it somehow, but not in a way that uses a new auction".
Frankly, this judge has just been pretty bad at their job. More than a few rulings have been just weird ramblings from the judge with unclear instructions to the trustee and the other parties.
And all this mainly appears to be because the judge doesn't like the amount that Infowars was sold for.
Out of curiosity, does anyone in this thread who is commenting on the quality of this judge or the sanity of his ruling practice bankruptcy law? I don’t, and I’m having a hard time evaluating these claims.
Not a whole lot of bankruptcy lawyers on the internet that I've seen.
But here's one business law lawyer/professor breakdown of the proceedings that I think is pretty good [1]
[1] https://confrontationality.substack.com/p/bankrupt-alex-jone...
So he's been doing bankruptcy for five years, which should be enough time for him to understand the intricacies of the statutes and case law. Sometimes you see judges put in specialty courts with no experience in that domain and make some absurd rulings.
He’s been doing bankruptcy since at least 2013.
Infowars and Alex Jones have some fanatic followers. It should be investigated if the judge has been threatened to come to this conclusion.
The Onion should be investigated for making a false bid for which they never had the money for.
>Jones' attorney Ben Broocks told Lopez at a hearing on Monday that the Onion only put up half as much cash as the $3.5 million offer from First American United Companies but boosted its bid with "smoke and mirrors" calculations.
Yes and Lopez rejected that as an issue. He also accepted the logic of why the Trustee picked the onion.
What Lopez did not like was the dollar amount and how the auction was ran, that's it.
Lopez kept the Trustee on board, though, because he doesn't believe the Trustee did anything wrong (Strangely since the Trustee organized the auction).
It wasn't a false bid, it was a bid that would have relieved Jones of more debt than the bid FAUC put up. Which was accepted by his creditors.
Judge Lopez was appointed by Trump, so I'd assume that he's acting under instructions. Why would Trump have appointed a judge who wouldn't do favors for him?
I hope you realize that he can't fire judges just because he appointed them.
I believe the implication isn’t that he’d be fired. Rather that doing the bidding of the far right (as instructed) was the deal he made to get the job. I look at it as payment for services rendered.
So the deal's "contract" is backed by honor then. Doesn't seem to make sense but I suppose it's possible. Is there any evidence that it is happening?
Shouldn't all of the mechanics of the auction been agreed upon explicitly or at least implicitly with past precedent of bankruptcy auctions? How did the lawyers go ahead of an auction that even had a chance of being thrown out by the judge?
This is something that was brought up in the hearings.
For starters, one issue here is the Judge is just, frankly, bad at giving instructions. He left how the auction should be ran up to the Trustee who ultimately used an auction company which handles these sorts of liquation auctions. He didn't give clear instructions on what he wanted.
FAUC (alex jones's new company) did not raise any issues with the auction until after they found out that they lost. They had multiple communications with the auction house and the trustee right up until the winners were announced. It was only after they lost that they started throwing a stink about how the auction was ran.
Frankly, it's a bad faith argument by FAUC that's just sour grapes over losing. They were always going to challenge the results on a loss, but it does look bad for them that they didn't do that until after the loss.
Lopezes problem with the auction was mainly that he felt like the amounts were too low. He didn't really explain why he felt that and has left everything really ambiguous (not a good judge IMO). He has left the managing of infowars under the care of the Trustee and has basically given them a "fix it" order with really no clear guidelines on how they are supposed to do that (other than don't do another auction).
Surely this ruling is immediately (interlocutory) appealable?
Obviously that would add another two years of misery, but still...
Appealable, yes, pretty much all orders are appealable.
Everyone has 2 weeks to file an appeal to this ruling and the Judge has given 30 days for the Trustee to figure out how to fix things.
We'll see what happens.
In any event, yes, likely we are going to see this dragged out like crazy. What's wild is IDK what happens when all the infowars funds dry up if this is stuck in litigation. Bankruptcies aren't usually drawn out like this (and it's somewhat designed to be very streamlined).
Judge Lopez's argument (as communicated by the nytimes) appears invalid.
The standard American auction is the "English Open Cry" auction. The kind of auction we expect to see at cattle auctions, estate auctions, charity auctions, etc. The English Open Cry is what is known as a "second price" auction, which means that the winning bidder will pay 1 increment more than the next highest bidder was willing to pay.
When you have a "sealed" or "secret" bid auction, the fundamental game changes to the "Vickrey Auction" which is a "first price" auction. This means that the highest bidder wins and pays the price they bid... which is expected to be the highest price at which they would be happy with the transaction.
The Sealed-Bid auction should generate a price that is greater than or equal to the English Open Cry in all situations.
The only caveat is that since the Sealed-Bid auction is always less kind to the bidder, it may not attract as many bidders as the English Open Cry.
> The Sealed-Bid auction should generate a price that is greater than or equal to the English Open Cry in all situations.
Not necessarily. In many sealed-bid auctions, bidders hope to win with a lower bid (often much lower) than they would if they were bidding against others in the same room. This is especially true if you have no idea whether anyone else is bidding on the item at all. I have placed very low bids on items in sealed-bid auctions for things I had no immediate need for, but would happily pay for if the cost was very low (and I have won many such items, sometimes because no one else even bid on them).
You're confused. It's the Vickrey auction which is second-price. English auctions are first-price. First-price sealed-bid auctions are different from Vickrey auctions.
Given how the NYT is describing the entire court case (only a level above shit slinging from Twitter), it sounds like this is less about any rationale and more dragging of the feet to get any kind of "win" out of this whole kerfluffle.
The judge basically says as much in the end:
>“You’ve got to scratch and claw and get everything you can for everyone else,” he said.
Which is a truly bizarre statement for a judge to make given the nature of this entire case. Then again, "good faith errors" certainly shows the bias of this judge here.
> The Sealed-Bid auction should generate a price that is greater than or equal to the English Open Cry in all situations.
That is a very large claim to make that ignores psychology. If it were true, you would never see open cry auctions used anywhere.
> The Sealed-Bid auction should generate a price that is greater than or equal to the English Open Cry in all situations.
Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe standard "English" auctions would be so popular if it was true.
Parent commenter's description of the difference between an ascending bid auction and a second price auction (or Vickrey auction) is very confused. You can review the first chapter of "Mechanism Design and Approximation" for an introduction to auctions and proofs of the optimality of different auctions for different goals (e.g. the second price auction is proven to maximize social surplus): https://jasonhartline.com/MDnA/
This is almost entirely wrong in all respects. You can review the first chapter of "Mechanism Design and Approximation" for a good introduction to auction design. https://jasonhartline.com/MDnA/
Thanks! The archived snapshot doesn’t have that, it must have been added later.
From the article: "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. “It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,” Judge Lopez said. “Nobody knows what anybody else is bidding,” he added."
Wait, couldn’t this same argument be made in reverse? If the bids were open, the competing parties could simply go $1 above the highest offer, which suggest sealed bids are most appropriate to maximize the value. Auctions can’t be fairly judged in hindsight, generally speaking.
If the bids are secret and the highest bidder pays what they bid then bidders have the incentive to try to bid strategically, i.e. less than what they'd be willing to pay as long as they think that's more than anyone else would be willing to pay. Plus, if there is someone who thinks it's worth way more than anyone else, they could just place a modest bid and then if they lose buy it from the winner for $1 more than what the winner values it at anyway.
The way you can avoid this with secret bids is to specify that the highest bidder will pay $1 more than the second highest bidder no matter how high they bid. Then everyone has the incentive to actually specify the maximum they'd be willing to pay, because if the next highest bid is lower than that they still actually do want to buy it, but they lose nothing by bidding higher because they only pay a dollar more than the next highest bidder no matter what, and then you maximize bids.
But by that point you don't benefit from keeping the high bid a secret anymore, because of human psychology. Someone bids $100, is the current high bidder and thinks they're getting to buy it, then someone outbids them and loss aversion kicks in so they make a higher bid, even though the first bid was supposed to be their max.
Known as a "second-price" or Vickrey auction for anybody who wants to read some auction game theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction
Yeah but in the bankruptcy setting, this would demonstrate that the trustee didn't get as much as they could.
Does it? If it's public knowledge that Alice would pay $200 and Bob would pay $100 then Alice wouldn't actually bid $200, she'd bid $101 and still win, the same result as that type of auction. If nobody knows what Alice would bid except Alice then it's even worse, because Bob thinks he could win at $60 and would rather pay $60 than $100 and Alice correctly predicts that Bob is going to do that and then wins by bidding $75. And if Bob bids $80 then Alice can still buy it from Bob for $110 but the estate is still getting $80 instead of $101.
Go bank to pseudo security. This is the letter of an argument again ingnoring the spirit of the judgment/law/...
The spirit is that a person owes families he defamed billions of dollars and that person doesn't like who they need to sell their assets to to make that money. I don't even know how and why the details of how this money is recouped is important. If I go bankrupt and need to sell my house, I sure can't stop it from being sold to Hitler or something absurd like that.
Well they are the creditors, so they put their credit up against the value of the thing. It's no different than what a bank does when it bids on a house it put up for auction after a mortgagee default. Here the only difference is that the bidding was blind, which the judge took issue with.
How would it do that? You need to leave a little on the table for the deal to work.
Because they'd be paying a dollar more than the second highest bid, not the amount of the highest bid. Frankly, I'm not sure how that could not be more clear.
> If the bids were open, the competing parties could simply go $1 above the highest offer [..]
Isn't that what you want to happen?
All the auctions I've ever participated have repeated this very process until none of the buyers are prepared to raise their bid, at which point it appears the seller has got the highest price anyone will offer.
What am I missing?
In theory, a Second-price sealed-bid auction will produce the same price as an Open ascending-bid auction. Every bidder will offer the true value of the item to them, and the item will go to the highest bidder at the second-highest price.
But some people might think, due to human nature, that one auction or the other gets higher prices. Maybe an open bid auction gets lower bids, because interested people start lower knowing they can bid again, then back out when they see there's a lot of competition. Maybe sealed-bid auctions work better for large organisations, as getting board approval and CFO sign-off on a multi-million-dollar expenditure takes a few days. Or maybe an open bid auction gets bidders het up and excited because they're in second place and surely no matter what you've bid, you'd always bid 5% more to win - right?
None of which is backed by theory, but if it feels true to the judge - who's to say?
IMHO the main value of buying infowars, to The Onion, was the publicity and headlines. Those are harvested now. If the auction was repeated I can't imagine The Onion upping their bid.
> who's to say?
Surely we could find a professional, whose job it is to liquidate assets after a court decision, that the judge would trust?
If this existed, it should have a name that emphasizes the trust aspect.
The article suggests that this is is a first price sealed bid auction instead of a second price sealed bid auction. Skipping over the more complex nature of the Onion bid, the linked articles states "The total value of The Onion’s bid was $7 million" and "First United American Companies had a higher bid, offering $3.5 million in cash".
In some parts of the world, they auction houses in this exact manner. You show up, post a very large amount of money to prove you're serious, then everyone bids in person like an art auction.
Here in Canada, when the market is hot there are lots of auctions withe multiple buyers competing for a house. In my market (Southern Ontario), it is almost always a sealed bid situation, and winning buyers often outbid their rivals by tens of thousands of dollars.
The agents around here are fond of a process engineered to maximize the bids: If there are multiple bids that are all reasonable, they will tell the lowballs to go home, while telling those remaining how many bids are in, and offering everyone a chance to "sweeten up" before a final decision is made.
I personally would never buy a home through such a process, which tells you that I absolutely would love to sell my home in exactly this fashion should the market be hot whenever that happens.
Now that being said, I cannot say for certain whether the frenzy of shouting bids while staring your opponents in the eye will produce more money or the sealed bids will produce more money.
sealed bidding entices bidders who really want something to overbid to ensure they win. It is a common strategy to maximize offers
They could do an open run-off round of bids until they have two potential buyers, and then switch to secret ballot to get each party's highest bid I suppose?
You're not missing anything. Most US legal reporting complete shit, opting to write about the implications rather than do any legal analysis.
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.
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...
$1.5 billion is more than Exxon paid for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Alex Jones must have been really nasty.
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
The fraudulent conveyance may have been the move of the vitamin company itself, but the purchase in bankruptcy wouldn't be a fraudulent transation.
Letting Jones buy back his 'bankrupt' assets using money he fraudulently hid goes against the spirit of the law, even in the purchasing phase.
This guy should be living in his parents basement and barred from publishing on any significant media platforms. He's proven willing to exploit victims for personal gain to the tune of the millions of dollars.
It's not a good outcome, but it's also not fraudulent conveyance. Principally because the proceeds of the sale go to the victims.
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.
That is not what happened, though.
One group of creditors said they were willing to abandon some of their claims, which means other creditors would have gotten a larger share of the smaller bid, effectively making these other creditors better off.
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.
Law is almost inherently poliical. Politics was in the equation the moment Jones decided to pretend a tragic school shooting was fake news.
So where is justice in this equation then?
The proceeds of the sale will not come close to the value of the judgement - and Jones has acted extremely dishonestly through the process and repeatedly tried to move value from his company to his parents and other affiliate companies. I don't believe it's a fraudulent conveyance but there's a lot of awful happening here.
>A transfer will be fraudulent if made with actual intent to hinder, delay, or defraud any creditor.
If they get it less, later, or more chaotically, or if that was the intent it is.
Nah it's just typical rich people getting away with everything stuff & we'll continue to let it happen because we are hapless.
It does really appear that America's getting her own, homegrown oligarchs.
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.
Correct. 10/10 summary
Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller... we've had them.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's a chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy estate already owns the infowars assets.
> 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.
Specifically, the reason is protecting minority and junior creditors (including the debtor when assets are in excess of debts). If nobody offered up enough cash to pay off the debts in full and there is only one creditor who would rather have the business than the best cash offer, I don't think there'd be any reason for the courts to object. The big issue is, again, minority creditors getting less than their "fair share" of the assets, along with over-compensating senior claims with junior ones outstanding.
Neither are at issue here - The Onion's offer paid more cash to the minority creditors, the majority creditor opted into the deal, and the assets are clearly worth less than the debts.
"Cash to minority creditors" doesn't matter. "Cash to the estate" is all that matters. The Onion's offer carried $1.75 million in cash to the creditors. Alex Jones's vitamin company offered $3.5 million in cash.
The Onion bid was legally the correct bid to accept. It's got nothing to do with the cash amount, totally irrelevant.
> 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.
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.
>It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.
you'd be surprised how many fall off from a migration. It's no different network effect from anything else. The hardcore will follow, the passive will fall off. Even a cult following like this isn't immune to this (simply more resilient).
> 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.
This is absolutely true. Other media people that lost their job or channel, handle on various platforms, typically refresh to the same number of followers within a year or two.
> 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.
They get to garnish those profits, too.
No bankruptcy resolves the debt. Otherwise there would be no point in a bankruptcy process.
No, not necessarily, and not in this case.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/alex-jones-cant-avoid-sandy-ho...
> Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to escape paying at least $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his repeated lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday.
> Bankruptcy can be used to wipe out debts and legal judgments, but not if they result from "willful or malicious injury" caused by the debtor, according to a decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston, Texas.
Bankruptcies have all sorts of exceptions like this for fraud, student loans, child support, unpaid taxes, etc.
Exactly.
The intent of bankruptcy law is to benefit the economy by allowing people and corporations to take risks and start over.
It's not to let them get away with defamation.
So there's a line between healthy economic risk-taking (bankruptcy discharges) and bad behavior (bankruptcy doesn't affect that).
FTX creditors would like to have a word with you.
It does seem likely to be true, although apparently, based on its bid, his affiliated company sees $3.5 million worth of extra value in keeping the Infowars brand and structure as opposed to going that route.
> 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.
Also of note, the other creditors agreed to this bid.
> 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.
That's what they did, and that's what was rejected here, right?
Although it sounds like maybe this was more of a procedural rejection than a dispositive one...
> That's what they did, and that's what was rejected here, right?
Except they weren't the highest bidder?
They were if you count the amount they claimed to be putting in from their award:
“The total value of The Onion’s bid was $7 million, including $1.75 million in cash put up by Global Tetrahedron, with the rest coming from the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, who essentially opted to put a portion of their potential earnings from a defamation judgment against Mr. Jones toward The Onion’s bid.”
Their bid was essentially "something that economically feels like $100k more than the next highest bidder to people who aren't us" which is a clever contractual construction but not an auction bid.
Not if they have to put up actual cash...
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.
Did you read the article? That's exactly what they did.
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.
Hence the if
>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.
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.
> There was no public auction of InfoWars
The auction was indeed very public. The bids were not.
The only requirement to participate was you had to show the Trustee that you were serious and had the means to participate. Only 2 parties did that.
The auction dates were published in newspapers and various news outlets announced that it was going to happen.
> There was no public auction of InfoWars. That alone is a stain on the whole process.
Sealed bid auctions are not some absurd rarity in this sort of situation and I have no idea why you believe they are.
> 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.
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.
This is completely false.
Debt can absolutely be sold for whatever it is worth. In this case, the Jones' debt owned by the Sandy Hook families is fairly valuable to Jones' other debtors because it means they get a bigger slice of the bankruptcy estate. Thus the Sandy Hook families can offer enough of their Jones' debt in the sale to make it more valuable. (Edit: more complicated than how I explained it because both sets of debtors include Sandy Hook families)
This isn't any more "imaginary" than money itself.
but you can pledge the debt itself.
> I say cash loosely speaking
Is this a legal term or something? Not to be rude, but who cares what you mean by it? It's totally besides the point
>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.
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.
but if we launder it through law talking then it cannot be questioned.
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.
So where were all the other bidders offering $10 million plus?
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.
If all parties were happy with a bid, why does it need to be run "fairly"? This isn't house auction offereing up an artifact, this is a man guilty in the court of law going bankrupt and divvying off his assets. If the people in charge of said divvying and the ones owed money are happy, who really cares?
All parties were not happy with the bid, which is why this went to a judge.
That's confusing. We know from the reporting that some parties were happy with the bid. I guess, you mean "not all parties were happy..."?
(Please note: this is not a case of ∀x ∈ X ¬P(x) ≣ ¬∀x ∈ X P(x). ∀x ∈ X ¬P(x) means "for all x not-P", while ¬∀x ∈ X P(x) reads "there exists no x that P", i.e. there is no party that is happy with the bid, which is either a false statement or not the intended meaning. This is actually a common, but not well-known mistake, so I'm pointing it out.)
EDIT: I even found a reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_quantification
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?
I don't really know, but Elon Musk has been known to buy media companies that don't give him a good ROI, and he was making noise about putting a bid together on this one.
> and he was making noise about putting a bid together on this one.
The list of things Musk makes noise about but does not do gets a little longer.
>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.
> It was specifically structured to give better-than-next-offer
That is the most farcical bit. When you strip away all the legalese, the offer was literally formulated as "next best offer + $". That is not a valid sealed-bid offer.
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.
> 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.
>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 $500M in actual cash. Then it gets divied up accordingly.
>This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.
Isn't it telling that the same judge said it was done improperly? Trustees have an obligation to follow standard practices which maximize cash flow or at least don't give the appearance of impropriety.
> Isn't it telling that the same judge said it was done improperly? Trustees have an obligation to follow standard practices which maximize cash flow or at least don't give the appearance of impropriety.
This is incorrect - trustees have an obligation to maximize the benefit to debtors. You'll see common examples of non-monetary benefit when it comes to wills - a cabinet that may be valued at 150$ but has immense sentimental value may be given to inheritors even if there is a 200k bid on it if that is what the beneficiaries all agree to.
You are treating debt discharging too literally like a numbers game - there are other important factors and in this case all the debtors were aligned and would have clearly preferred the deal with the lower monetary value.
>This is incorrect - trustees have an obligation to maximize the benefit to debtors. You'll see common examples of non-monetary benefit when it comes to wills - a cabinet that may be valued at 150$ but has immense sentimental value may be given to inheritors even if there is a 200k bid on it if that is what the beneficiaries all agree to.
Probate court is different from bankruptcy court. You can only do something nonstandard if all creditors agree. Some of these creditors are almost certainly banks that are owed money by AJ.
>You are treating debt discharging too literally like a numbers game - there are other important factors and in this case all the debtors were aligned and would have clearly preferred the deal with the lower monetary value.
There are very few sentimental factors in bankruptcy. The few that do apply (such as protections of property with little value) exist to benefit the debtor and not the creditors.
>You can only do something nonstandard if all creditors agree.
As far as this NYT story goes, they all did agree. It's AJ's lawyer who intervened.
> 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
No, that's not the _only_ fair way. Suppose the $2B creditor bids $200M in cash and also agrees to forfeit their share of the proceeds from the sale. Then the $1B creditor would receive the entire $200M, which is more than the $167M they would have received from a $500M cash sale. The bid is effectively equivalent to $600M.
Isn't that what happened in the InfoWars case? The bankruptcy judge agreed that the structure of the Onion's bid was valid; he just said the auction would have continued for more rounds.
> 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.
You actually can, so long as it's the best offer for the other creditors. So long as you can come up with sufficient cash for the minority creditors you're entitled to dispose of the asset in any way you see fit. The Pennsylvania families came up with the cash (via The Onion's cash offer and structuring the payout).
In your theoretical framework you can. In real-life bankruptcy court, you almost certainly can't.
Says who? It was clearly going to work like that until more lawyer nitpicking intervened about the auction (not the sale itself).
Honestly I don't see how this theoretical framework is much different from corporate leveraged buyouts.
This isn't a leveraged buyout. Also this structure is not at all like a leveraged buyout.
My point is going over your head. Pledging money that you will never receive to get over the finish line is not the best offer. You could not consider such debt in any other purchase. Going back to that example, if the guy owed $2B pledged to buy the asset for $500M and the other one didn't even know about the auction, or instead pledged $501M, then the one who was owed less would be stealing from the one who was owed more. The fact that neither of them has any actual money is another very troublesome point on its own, as is the fact that the bidding was completely private. There might have been someone willing to pay 10x the winning bid for InfoWars in actual cash and been out of the loop.
Put it in any other context. Do you think a bank would issue a loan whose repayment was contingent on income from an individual who was seeking relief in bankruptcy? Obviously they would not. The court has an obligation to not accept fugazi money to buy real assets.
My understanding is that the other (minor) creditors would get more cash in the Onion offer because the Sandy hook reps weren’t going to take their huge cut in the event their preferred bid was accepted. That means in any other deal, the other creditors would be strictly worse off. The families would be financially worse off but they were the ones driving the decision, so they clearly felt holistically better off.
I don’t see how they shouldn’t be able to take less money themselves as long as the other creditors also got more money.
>>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.
Except what if all the creditors prefer that outcome to the "more cash" outcome? If the way it would get divvied up is $499m to you and $1m to me, vs $350m to you and $50m to me (but you get some other benefit that you prefer), why shouldn't that be accepted?
> 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.
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.
> 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?
I believe officially the vitamin company is owned by his parents and isn't included in the judgement against Alex Jones.
How is that not fraud?
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
>But the legal system is moving slowly.
FFS, it's actively working in his favor right now!
Since when has that mattered? He'll get a pardon in 1 month anyway.
Only federal crimes can be pardoned by the president.
Everything here is state-level. The next president can't touch any of it.
They've already suspended his sentencing indefinitely due to the election win.
That's a non-sequitur.
Justice departments don't go after presidents or president-elects in order to prevent a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the remedy in that case.
This policy is entirely unrelated to presidential pardon power.
Who? Trump? What does that have to do with anything?
Well supposedly federal govt can't intervene in state cases but the conviction against trump is at the state level, so why isn't he being sentenced? Because power isn't about rules.
As others said above, the president has certain immunities to prevent constitutional crises. But that's only for the president, and it's not part of his pardoning powers (which wouldn't work here anyway).
So why isn't he going to jail for felony falsification of business records (forget the classified records case, he's not meant to be immune from that but here we are)
My point is that power is not about what the law says, it's about what people can get away with through their relations with other people.
His conviction wasn't overturned, they are just delaying his sentencing because he's now going to be the president again. He's not doing it by any power of the federal gov't.
Exactly, there's no rule (certainly no federal rule) that says a guy can't go to jail just because he was elected president. So why isn't he? Because he has power that is not assigned to him by any law. He is a bully with a cult of personality that makes people fear him and/or act as his sycophants.
I wouldn't bet on this. Trump can use a punitive executive order to pressure the state until the governor pardons Alex Jones.
Pardons are for crimes. This is a civil suit, not a criminal one.
Fraud is a crime.
There's no fraud conviction, there can't be a pardon. There's not even fraud charges, so what would the pardon be for... I find your rebuttal confusing.
You can pre-emptively pardon someone. Seemingly.
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.
Likely different legal entities. Johnson & Johnson tried to get out of the talc powder settlement by creating a different legal entity to contain responsibility and damages. A court ruled that invalid but this type of corporate entity manipulation happens all the time. With the vitamin company, it might be that Jones is not majority owner of it but the other owners are sympathetic to him. Giving Jones' ownership stake to the Infowars creditors wouldn't change anything if Jones is not the controlling owner. This is all supposition on my part and perhaps he is the controlling owner but the court for some reason decided not to include it in his bankruptcy assets. It's a weird world when we allow artificial people to exist in the form of corporations.
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.
How can any entity related to Alex Jones be allowed to buy the InfoWars assets?
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.
It is pure bullshit is what it is.
It is fraud and that bid should be disqualified.
What is pure bullshit? How exactly is Alex Jones supposed to pay $1 billion dollars to anyone? What is the purpose of this entire spectacle?
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.
> How exactly is Alex Jones supposed to pay $1 billion dollars to anyone?
One dollar after another.
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.
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_aucti...
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sealed-bid-auction.asp
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction
> They’re not as efficient as Vickrey auctions [3], but nobody actually does that.
I've always been curious -- do you know why?
It's certainly not for lack of familiarity, considering that paying the second-highest bid is basically how eBay works.
And eBay doesn't reveal people's maximum bids either. And so between that and the prevalence of last-second sniping, it essentially operates as sealed for all practical purposes.
The "winning" offer was formulated such that its cash value depended upon the next best offer. I.e., when you strip away the complexity it was of the form "next best offer + $". That this bid "won" indicates the "auction" was not a sealed-bid auction of the kind you are thinking of.
Wait no none of this is right, it doesn't make it an unsealed auction just because one or more of the bids has terms and conditions. This is how every real-estate transaction is conducted.
What makes it fine in the end is that once you collect all the bids and resolve the legal paperwork you can assign values to the individual bids and compare them which is how people who sell their homes choose what offer to go with. And home sellers do consider intangibles and go with lower-cash offers all the time.
I don't really understand what all the legal kerfuffle is about. Is the court really going to force the families into a sale they don't want when the sale is for their benefit however they choose to define it?
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.
> 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.
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).
> roblem with auction procedures in this case wasn't the actual auction methodology, but the lack of notice and the difficulty of submitting a bid
Which would make sense. That's not what the article quotes as the judge's reason (nor what you've said).
The quote in the article criticises sealed bids. That's mind-blowingly wrong to the point of having substance on appeal. It's so wrong I expressed scepticism it's actually the case, scepticism based on experience evaluating bankruptcy claims.
Yeah, the article is incorrect about that (like I said, sealed bids are very unusual in bankruptcy auctions, but the actual opinion cites the other stuff), and when I said that the auction procedure was farcical, I did not mean that the underlying algorithm of the auction was wrong, but that the procedures run by the auctioneer were awful.
> 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.
It's correct if there's a new, open auction that does even better than the current Onion offer.
The judge ruled out holding a new auction.
...But then, why not cancel that new auction too, in hopes that a third auction will yield even more?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The sale to Alex Jones would have given the creditors basically nothing since the assets used to buy should already be theirs.
>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.
it's fraud, Jones' parents own the vitamin company
> 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.
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?
I am just some guy who doesn't actually know much about this. This being the internet, though:
If I understand, it's pretty routine in real estate foreclosures for a creditor to win the auction simply by bidding the outstanding value of the debt. Thus not needing to actually come up with much or any cash. This gains the ability to use or resell the property however you want.
How is one situation different from the other?
Bankruptcy runs by different rules than foreclosures (which is why people about to be foreclosed on often file bankruptcy). Specifically, junior creditors are protected, and everyone gets a proportionate share of the proceeds.
In a foreclosure, the senior lienholder usually gets the property and the junior lienholders either get nothing or get what’s left over after the senior creditor gets whatever they were owed.
I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal… it seems they would have had an easy time buying out the junior creditors and then getting whatever they want, although I’m also not sure why anyone would want the “infowars.com” domain and a warehouse full of vitamin pills.
> I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal…
The reason is because there were two civil judgements against Alex Jones to satisfy with the second judgement being about 27x larger than the first. As a result, it is mathematically impossible to run an auction that triggers an outcome large enough to satisfy both judgements proportionally and positively. Many members of the second judgement decided to forego any winnings from this auction so as to satisfy the first judgement positively on the condition they would earn a share of ad revenue from the intellectual property in the future. Their primary motivation was not ad revenue or any other form of income, but instead ensuring the concerned intellectual property rests with an owner not friendly to Alex Jones.
That is the reason the Onion won the auction despite offering the lower of two bids, because the larger bid did not positively satisfy the parties to the first judgement.
> I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal… it seems they would have had an easy time buying out the junior creditors and then getting whatever they want, although I’m also not sure why anyone would want the “infowars.com” domain and a warehouse full of vitamin pills.
The creditors with smaller claims hate the guts of the creditors with bigger claims, and likely wouldn't sell for any amount of money. Also, I am not sure whose claims have been decided to be senior to other claims (seniority of claims has little to do with monetary amount). Not all types of debt are equal.
Bankruptcy is something that happens to the borrower. Foreclosure is something that happens to the property.
Correct, although a foreclosure of a property will be affected if the owner of said property undergoes bankruptcy. (For private individuals, such as Mr Jones, some or all of their primary residential property is exempt from bankruptcy, and the foreclosure itself will be stayed until the bankruptcy is adjudicated, and, generally speaking, foreclosure will be stopped if they resume making mortgage payments, regardless of prior delinquencies.)
Statement from The Onion (via CEO Ben Collins): https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3lcyypa...
And here's the statement from Jones: https://x.com/realalexjones/status/1866752494317003142
To save you a click. Ben Collins (CEO The Onion):
We are deeply disappointed in today's decision, but The Onion will continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured.
We will also continue to seek a path towards purchasing InfoWars in the coming weeks. It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome of this case.
We appreciate that the court repeatedly recognized The Onion acted in good faith, but are disappointed that everyone was sent back to the drawing board with no winner, and no clear path forward for any bidder.
And for all of those as upset about this as we are, please know we will continue to seek moments of hope. We are undeterred in our mission to make a funnier world.
I appreciate that the tweet actually had context about what happens next:
"…continue to seek a path towards purchasing…"
"…back to the drawing board…"
The article could have used those details.
-----
[edit] They've updated the article.
It said that exact thing, but didn't need a number of tweets to say it. Advantage: article.
A bankruptcy trustee was involved during the whole process (3rd party neutral). While the goal of increasing money to creditors here may work due to the free publicity, it harms the creditors interests who already agreed to the settlement. So you have a third party neutral trustee and the creditors who were harmed agreeing.
With that said bankruptcy judges do reject plans quite often and this is a high profile case.
The amount of folks here supporting Alex Jones is completely shocking to me.
He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered. He's scum of the earth.
That business was taken away from him, and folks think that's too much? What the actual fuck.
It shocking to me too. I can't understand how people are 'both sides-ing' this or just supporting him under some free speech argument. Free speech has limits and a court found Jones went too far and that cost him his business.
Reflexive contrarianism runs amok in these parts. It’s pretty pathetic.
People have been arguing the same bogus free speech point in the UK recently because people have been arrested for saying things that are anti-immigration and offensive online.
People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue. If you go around tweeting hateful things about the Royal family and the courts find you guilty, don't be surprised if that costs you your freedom. It's pretty simple.
Alex is legally free to saying whatever he wants, but he had the wrong views on Sandy Hook and his wrong views hurt the families affected, therefore he deserves to lose his business.
To be clear I haven't seen a single comment that could be charitably characterized as "supporting Alex Jones". I see a lot of comments that are pointing out that the judgment against him seems unreasonable given the damage he did to these families.
I see a few instance of people defending his actions as "free speech."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42387916
"View it for what it is: a deliberate attack on free speech. This is essentially legislating from the bench. They can't ban him from speaking but they can make it very VERY expensive to do so, and warn anyone else at the same time."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42385358
"Maybe the “victims” should go after the actual shooter for a billion dollars then.
Instead we have people crying that free speech is the actual evil crime here."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42389350
It is unreasonable imo. He deserves to see jail time.
The people pointing out that the judgment is 'unreasonable' are either intentionally lying or extremely ignorant.
The context is that the judge awarded a default judgment because Alex Jones literally refused to participate in the legal system. He committed overt perjury (and was outright caught on this) and proceeded to just stop complying entirely.
If any of us received a court summons and refused to show up or defend ourselves the court isn't going to shrug and say the case goes away. In a system of law you can't just ignore the law and expect the judge to take pity on you.
Torts are not just about damage, they're also about deterrence. Jones repeatedly demonstrated in the court battle that no deterrence would work on him.
His entire business is built on this kind of defamation -- how much proceeds of this kind of business should he be allowed to keep?
About 30% of people are assholes, and birds of a feather flock together.
Consciously or unconsciously, people begin with an unshakable feeling of “my tribe good,” then reverse engineer a justification for whatever issue is being politicized. Even if it involves defending a repugnant conman and slanderer like Jones.
It just goes to show that far too many people have no fundamental values, only political affiliations.
You're surprised? In any vaguely political thread HN is pretty much just a more well-spoken 4chan. Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content, which along with its techno-libertarian origins makes it the perfect breeding ground for fascists and pseudo-intellectualism.
> Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content
My least favorite thing about reading HN, by far. Glad someone else said it.
>The amount of folks here supporting Alex Jones is completely shocking to me
That shouldn't be a surprise considering how many American libertarian techbros are fans of Alex Jones Lite (Joe Rogan).
It's Hacker News. I hate to say it, but this is all the website is known for at this point. Bring it up in passing conversation with the in-crowd and you'll get laughed out of the room for using "Orange Site" and fraternizing with drug-addled Elon worshipers and "soloprenuers" that beg for recognition for their dogshit SaaS product. The score has been known for years, the political leaning of Hacker News is basically the same as the "curious individuals" that inform themselves via JRE and random X accounts from Russia.
The people using Hacker News are regularly a stone's throw away from the sort of people that use 4chan. Except Hacker News has usernames and karma so it tends to create cults of personality around people that say what people want to hear.
For an entire week, I thought this was an Onion parody headline, and didn't realize the Onion _actually_ tried to buy Info Wars. We're living in such an entertaining era. Life imitates art.
Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd. I'm not being hyperbolic saying people would be less mad at him if he had done the shooting himself.
And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
Jones continued to inflict harm on families who’d lost children, and profited significantly from it both financially and politically. He defied multiple courts, too, so there was no question of premeditation or incapacity, just repeated decisions to cause harm year after year.
That’s the difference: true crime podcasts don’t cause harm on that scale, and few people are going to defy the authority of the legal system the way he did.
While that is terrible, I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones. Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history. Whether the public endorses that harassment is more a question of how effective the reporters are than anything else.
It makes sense that Jones would lose the case, but the scale of the judgements was eye watering and is difficult to justify. The scale of the compensation is in a different world to the amount of damage done (intentionally, the bulk is punative). That changes the nature of what is going on.
He's been ignoring the courts. I don't know what you want them to do? I guess they could put him in prison, but I'm guessing that would be considered harsh too.
Again, for the 2nd time, its not what he's done, it's that he's ignoring everyone telling him to stop, including the government. I don't know what you expect the punishment for that to be. If it were you or I we would have had our asses dragged into prison a long time ago. He's only gotten this far because of his money.
Call me crazy, but I don't think the government should be able to "tell you to stop talking" about something just because it makes some people upset.
You’re welcome to try to get the laws against defamation repealed but until then there is a specific legal standard which was met in this case. If you think that’s unfair, perhaps start by asking yourself whether his lawyers made the same argument and why it failed.
> I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones
They're telling him to stop. That's what the judgement really is. He refused to defend himself in court and he's been told that he needs to stop. And you need to stop carrying water for him unless you can point to a single specific thing that the court did to him that was not fair, and making vague and uninformed statements about the big picture result doesn't count.
> Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history. Whether the public endorses that harassment is more a question of how effective the reporters are than anything else.
Do you have any examples supporting the equivalence you’re claiming? The high judgements were caused by his defiance of earlier judgements so that pattern is really what we’re looking for.
Not OP, but Fox Settled the dominion lawsuit for $725M [1]. So this type of harassment means big judgments against you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox...
How was that harassment? They directed a baseless smear campaign which posed a significant risk to Dominion’s business. Unless we’re defining “harassment” as “accountability”, that seems fair.
You're right, harassment might not be the right term when applied to a corporate entity. Either way these were both defamation suits.
I think the more important aspect is that both of these were cases where someone knowingly promulgated false information fully aware that their story was not supported by the facts. Real journalists don’t tend to do that both because it’s unethical and because it can be financially ruinous.
The situation is different in cases where the truth isn’t clear or where supporting evidence turns out to be fake because in those cases a real journalistic organization will retract or update their story. Had either of them been willing to do so, they almost certainly wouldn’t have even been sued. The Sandy Hook settlement was so large because it was obvious that Jones simply wasn’t going to leave the victims alone.
> While that is terrible, I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones.
As a single human being, he's literally not capable of suffering as much as the bereaved relatives of a classroom full of murdered children, shortly afterwards made the targets often by name and photo of the most insane people in the country.
> Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history.
Is this even an argument? They get sued all the time, and lose. They haven't ever viciously and endlessly gone after the parents of a classroom full of dead children. They did go after Richard Jewell and Steven J. Hatfill, though.
My understanding is he didn't lose the case on the merits. During discovery he was required to hand over documents from his Google account, but Google had locked his account and he couldn't get access. The judge then ruled he was in default for failing to produce.
This is obviously a massive abuse of the justice system, violating the maxim that the law does not compel the impossible. But, since the prevailing opinion (including both judge and jury) observably is "enh, fuck that guy" nobody much cares. However the shoe is going to be on the other foot sooner or later. It may be that hounding Alex Jones wasn't worth the precedent (making this style of lawfare acceptable, not an actual legal precedent) that this case sets.
I can easily imagine a case where, say, X blocks discovery in a similar way to achieve a similar outcome for someone on the left. Do we want this to be how we do things?
This is not at all what happened. I can't speak to his Google account, but Jones failed to produce text messages from his phone referencing Sandy Hook, claiming they didn't exist. Then his lawyers mistakenly sent a copy of the entire contents of his phone to the prosecution, showing that the text messages did in fact exist, and would have been found for a simple keyword search for "Sandy Hook," demonstrating that they were trying to conceal these messages from the court.
Jones lied under oath that he did not have the messages he had been ordered to provide but then accidentally turned them over, which came out quite dramatically in court:
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-62416324
Any time someone tells something is “obviously a massive abuse of the justice system”, ask them for details. Many people lie for political reasons knowing that their followers will not check the facts, but those claims usually fall apart as soon as you do. Lying to a judge or doing something you were ordered not to do is going to get you in trouble no matter what else is going on.
In the case of discovery about Google, note that there were two separate problems:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/alex-jones-and-infowars-were...
The first was that he lied about a spreadsheet not existing, and then the defense got evidence that it did - since that behavior was habitual, a judge is going to punish it more harshly than an isolated mistake which is promptly corrected.
The second problem was that he was trying to use the defense that he didn’t profit from Sandy Hook stories while not providing data which could have been used to test that claim. The judge didn’t jail him for that, but he wasn’t allowed to make an unverified “trust me bro” claim.
When was the last time he was profiting from Sandy Hook conspiracies? I heard him apologize for it years ago and say he doesn't believe it.
And true crime podcasts definitely do cause harm, the fans of those shows love playing vigilante detective, stalking and harassing people close to the case to get information. I remember a few years ago there was an incident where they were protesting outside of some guy's house because he was a suspect in his girlfriend's disappearance, so he couldn't even go outside. True crime is an entire industry monetizing tragedies in realtime on a scale the Sandy Hook conspiracies never came anywhere close to.
The deposition of his father clearly laid out that they saw spikes in sales when the sandy hook conspiracy was mentioned and actively sought to replicate it.
This doesn't answer the question about when this was occurring.
> Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is the Jones/Sandy Hook case-- like the Fox/Dominion case-- was an outlier because there is nearly never that amount of evidence to be able to pass the high bar for defamation.
So I think it's the other way around-- Jones was comically brazen in the claims he made. Hence the huge amounts in the Jones cases. (And if the podcasters are as brazen, go tell the real living people about their open-and-shut defamation cases and collect a nice finders fee for yourself. :)
Edit: clarification
Jones was also completely hostile to the courts and legal process. That will get you a larger punishment than someone who did the same actions but respected the court.
I watched some of his videos at the time and to me it seemed mostly like the exact same content that he always does. Very much not brazen claims of facts, just musing and speculating that it's all fake and the parents are smiling so they might be actors. That's it. And the entire time he was emphasizing that he doesn't know for sure and it's all theory.
he specifically called out parents by name, constantly made claims that they were obviously crisis actors, showed pictures of the parents, and did nothing when his listeners started harassing the parents daily.
The sentence you're claiming isn't hyperbolic is hyperbolic. While you can absolutely reasonably disagree with the judgement, I don't believe you can reasonably use a phrase like "seems like a nut" to summarize his part in this, if you're at all familiar with it and are being honest. "Immoral" would be the absolute minimum descriptor one could employ, even in the context of cold objectivity.
And why should we compare this to the podcast you're describing? They're two completely different kinds of immorality, and are not teams I must pick from.
As a CT native, you'll never coax an ounce of sympathy for Jones from me. He made his bed, doubled down, and faced justice. The system worked at least one time.
Nancy Grace comes to mind, who has far more reach being on national television. She made claims about people who were later found to be guilty. Her speculation pushed harassment.
Alex Jones has far more listeners than Nancy Grace has ever had. He was pulling down 8 figures selling fake boner pills and tin foil hats on his merch website.
later found to be NOT Guilty* I typod.
> And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
Can you cite any data on that at all? I’m aware of the genre of podcast you’re referring to but I’ve never been aware of it even remotely being the most popular genre.
it's #3 after comedy and news
https://www.statista.com/statistics/786938/top-podcast-genre...
True Crime as a whole may be.
That says nothing about "women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible" even existing at all. (Although I'm sure there's some examples of it somewhere.)
To conflate "true crime" and what the OP was referring to strikes me as pretty dishonest.
Popping open Podcast Addict, the top 10 podcasts right now are:
1. No Such Thing As A Fish; 2. My Brother, My Brother And Me; 3. Planet Money; 4. Revolutions; 5. 99% Invisible; 6. Stuff You Should Know; 7. The Adventure Zone; 8. This American Life; 9. Freakinomics Radio; 10. The Rest Is History
I had to scroll to #32 to find Casefile which sorta fits your criteria, except it's hosted by a dude and I think he generally discusses older cases.
#3 after comedy and news, ahead of sports.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/786938/top-podcast-genre...
Yeah OP is out of their mind on this point. Even spotify doesn't have many true crime podcasts in their top 50.
> And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
I am totally fine with convicting those for slander too. It is a pretty disgusting market.
His wealth is primarily the proceeds of slander and fraud. He should not have any of it.
Unfortunately, slander and fraud are really hard to enforce. In a just system he'd have never earned that money in the first place.
Fortunately, his legal defense was comedically incompetent.
So I'll take "all his money goes to his most-harmed victims" as a compromise.
Let’s talk about scale: Jones has to pay ~5x what Boeing did.
Boeing killed 346 people
https://apnews.com/article/boeing-guilty-plea-crashes-245a38...
Boeing killed people while making a not-good-enough design for a highly complex airplane system. And even though it killed 346 ppl, it continues to get millions people safely from point to point safely.
It's negligent and they need to change, but it's pretty forgivable.
Jones went on a mic and ripped false info, enriching no one but himself and grieving these families repeatedly.
This is misrepresentation, they didn't just happen to make a mistake in a complex situation. The crime was to know about the mistake and still not fix it - on purpose. The crime was to know that they should be giving people training on this system for safety reasons but they didn't anyway. Afaik it is an additional misrepresentation that the same system is now continuing on to fly. It is not, they fixed it and patched it.
Some of the issues were reported and a decision maker thought "we can get by without this". Pretty much the same reason the Challenger exploded. With a large company, there's gonna be reports about all sorts of stuff all the time, and you have to sort through the noise. They failed to do that here.
But is there any shred of doubt that no one, including the greediest most-souless bureaucrat, actually tried to make an airplane crash and kill people?
Crashing airplanes is VERY predictably bad for the stock price.
>But is there any shred of doubt that no one, including the greediest most-souless bureaucrat, actually tried to make an airplane crash and kill people?
This is not taking into account how humans are. People raise their children really badly all the time even though they know what they are doing is bad but they just don't care in the moment. Who wants a bad child? But they still make all the mistakes and end up producing bad children. Incompetence and malice are often nearly identical.
> Incompetence and malice are often nearly identical.
That is not the basis for our system of law. Intention (mens rea) matters greatly. Hence anyone who understands law shouldn't be surprised at comparing outcomes between the boeing case and the jones case.
You can disagree with it, but you really shouldn't be surprised.
There is lot of evidence that the faults in Boeing have been internally reported multiple times and neglected.
Who deserves stronger punishment: a man who makes an error while driving and kills a family by accident?
Or a man who deliberately runs a person down (but his target survived), and intends to continue doing so?
I feel like your first paragraph has some slight sense, but then you demolish it with the second paragraph which just shows that you actually have no idea who Alex Jones is or what he has done
> Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd.
I'm normally extremely sympathetic to this argument, but not only was this a conspiracy theory about dead children, but it implicated the bereaved, devastated parents and all of the relatives of those children. It's so many people that you can't really make up for it, ever. There's no number of dollars or good deeds that will get him into paradise.
The fact that he still operates in much the same way as before makes me think he's blessed by intelligence agencies to use as pretense for what they want to do or as distraction from what they are doing.
I don't agree with Jones' political positions, but as someone who was not born in America, I think I can see the issue in a less passionate and partisan way. For me it is clear that the this judgment had a gigantic political vector.
I fully agree on the guilty verdict, but the sentence, frankly, was meant as a political message for Jones and everyone else on his side of the political spectrum: Stop talking the things you talk, because we are coming for you, and we get you, you won't like it.
As someone who was born in a corrupt small town in a corrupt banana republic, and was somewhat familiar with this kind of thing, it was pretty easy to see it for what it was.
It is clear that Jones and his relatives have moved money and assets around in order to shield them from the verdict. Now, money that should have been already given to the victims is being used to steal back the megaphone that caused harmed in the first place. The end effect will probably be even more subscribers and money for Jones which he will use with even less restraint since he knows there are no consequences. There are no words for the evil going on here. What recourse is left when the legal system is this broken?
That's not what this judgement says. It actually says the sale did not generate enough money for the creditors and the process should be run again. I think the Judge maybe naive in thinking that re-running an auction will generate more money (normally it will generate less, as the losing bidders will drop out) but he did not agree with Jones' claims.
The creditors agreed to and supported the Global Tetrahedron plan to purchase Infowars and settle the bankruptcy. Seems like the judge is overstepping given Delaware law on this matter.
The main reasoning by the judge seemed to be that a single round sealed bid process is unlikely to maximize the sale price which on it's surface seems pretty accurate.
So long as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it anyways.
> main reasoning by the judge seemed to be that a single round sealed bid process is unlikely to maximize the sale price which on it's surface seems pretty accurate
Did the judge argue against the single round or the sealed price?
Criticising sealed bids is nonsense. The gold-standard auction (Vickrey, or more accurately, VCG) features sealed bids. If the judge is criticising sealed bids at all, The Onion should appeal.
Criticising a single-round auction, particularly with two bidders, on the other hand, is valid.
> as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it anyways
Isn't it also meaningless if the person whose estate they're collecting is bidding against them?
I have real world experience with a lot of different auction designs being deployed, including many variations of the VCG auction.
The VCG auction is only good in theory. In practice, most people don't know how much they actually value a thing, and when they are trying to play the VCG game they typically underbid and later have deep remorse. That's the most common mistake, but I've seen plenty of other mistakes as well.
In other words, VCG auctions tend not to work well because the bidders often don't have a strong enough grasp over game theory nor a deep enough understanding of how valuable an asset is to them, and therefore the VCG usually generates suboptimal outcomes.
In my experience, the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go. Instead, you have to talk yourself into taking a risk on being left holding the bag if you choose to push the price up.
> VCG auctions tend not to work well because the bidders often don't have a strong enough grasp over game theory nor a deep enough understanding of how valuable an asset is to them, and therefore the VCG usually generates suboptimal outcomes
May I hazard a guess that you worked on low-value recurring auctions? You're describing unsophisticated bidders unwilling to expend search costs. For them, yes, "the seller has an interest in providing participants with as much information as possible about the object’s value" both before bidding starts and during it, the latter due to the impact to bids being less than the overcoming of search costs.
> the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go
Another comment highlights why this doesn't work for high-value items [2]. (They also assume bona fide bids, which isn't a problem if you can filter out shill bids.)
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2020/pop...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42389681
> May I hazard a guess that you worked on low-value recurring auctions?
It varies. In all cases, the value was below $20,000, in many cases the auction was non-recurring and >$1,000 (for example, specific web domains). I've seen enough smart people fumble a $1,000+ VCG auction that I'd be nervous to assume bidding would be any better at $100 million. I've also seen enough investors fumble $10m+ investment deals (not auctions though) to feel comfortable asserting that a higher value auction does not necessarily imply that the participants will be better at auction theory.
The exact form of the auction is really really important though. A Vickery auction is single round and sealed but is critically a second price auction so bidder are incentivized to bid their maximum because they will get the second price which wasn't the case in this auction. Without the second price you're trying to bid just enough to outbid the other party/parties which won't maximize bid size.
> Isn't it also meaningless if the person whose estate they're collecting is bidding against them?
The blatant attempts to move assets out of InfoWars during the bankruptcy is an entirely different story but that money may technically come legally from outside the estate.
> exact form of the auction is really really important though
Sure. But nobody uses Vickrey because it's impossible to explain to the public why the highest bid wasn't accepted.
> Without the second price you're trying to bid just enough to outbid the other party/parties which won't maximize bid size
Which is exactly what happens in any single-round first-price format. The only thing an open auction does is facilitate collusion. Let me repeat: for a single-round first-price auction, sealed bids are the only way to go.
> that money may technically come legally from outside the estate
It may but it doesn't. Jones saying the judge "ruled in our favour" (emphasis mine) sort of gives away the game.
> nobody uses Vickrey because it's impossible to explain to the public why the highest bid wasn't accepted
Google used to use second-price for all their ads, though I think they've stopped: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/10858748
(Which I think, sadly, supports your claim around them being confusing)
There's a huge one people use all the time without knowing it, eBay is a second price auction too most people just don't use it like one. You can place a huge maximum bid and will only pay the second highest bid plus an increment. It just automatically semi-unseals bids as new bids come in so it looks a lot more like a live outcry auction.
> eBay is a second price auction too most people just don't use it like one. You can place a huge maximum bid and will only pay the second highest bid plus an increment. It just automatically semi-unseals bids as new bids come in so it looks a lot more like a live outcry auction.
This sounds small, but it's a huge difference. Let's I know that some widget is actually extremely valuable, and would be willing to pay up to $1,000. You don't know this, and are willing to pay $80. In a true second-price auction I put in $1000, you put in $80, the bids are unsealed and I pay $80.
But with the e-bay system, if I put in $1,000 at the beginning I've partially tipped my hand by bidding it up to $80. You started with some uncertainty about the value of the object, but knowing that I agree it's worth at least $80 pushes you in the direction of thinking it's worth more. This is a major advantage of sniping: by putting your bid in only at the last minute you keep others from reacting to your bid by changing theirs, and so convert the auction into something much closer to a true second-price auction.
Yes it different but it does work to increase the bid which is the goal of an auction, discover the best price an item can be sold for in a reasonably constrained time. The fact that it's worse of you as a bidder hoping to get a deal is actually good for it as an auction design.
There's also some assumptions built into these analyses that there's at least two people who have a reasonable perception of the value of an item. Things get massively more difficult to analyze when you start including changes in perceived value.
> fact that it's worse of you as a bidder hoping to get a deal is actually good for it as an auction design
The point is, in the above example, you wouldn't bid $1,000. So I will bid $50. Then $60. Then $70. Then $80. Then $90. And then, seeing the price has changed, I will stop. And wait. I am willing to pay $1,000. But it doesn't ever make sense for me to bid that.
Even in the eBay example you're betting against their being a third party that will attempt to come in with a late bid so the auction closes before you can respond. If you want the item it's still optimal to bid your maximum and allow the second price mechanism to function, if you bid $1000 and there's only one other bid of $80 (and the price increment is $10 or 12.5%) you get the item for $90 either way no matter if you bid that manually or if you placed a maximum bid. That's how a semi-sealed second price auction works (at least as eBay implements it) the next minimum bid is revealed as new bids come in that are responding like it's a live cry out auction. If there are multiple max bids it's just set to the highest second price plus the bid increment and the max bid is still hidden.
That's the beauty of the eBay system it works for people to interact in two ways, as a more boring sealed second bid system and as a live cry auction. The biggest point it falls apart is you need a certain number of people to understand the system to act rationally about it. If you only have people treat it like a live cry auction then it defaults to acting like one.
> you're betting against their being a third party that will attempt to come in with a late bid so the auction closes before you can respond
Yes. It's why people use bots, e.g. [1].
For low-value products, particularly amidst repeat auctions, the incentive to do so is small enough that one can mostly ignore it. For a high-stakes auction, you're just devolving the game into a high-frequency race.
> If you only have people treat it like a live cry auction then it defaults to acting like one
The point is it really only works as an English auction. The "sealed" bid is for convenience. (It's not really a sealed or even semi-sealed bid, it's just a dumb auto-bidding bot.) Run a major auction with this format and you'd have zero activity until the millisecond before bids were due followed by a mountain of lawsuits.
[1] https://www.gixen.com/main/index.php
You can use bots or you can bid your true maximum and receive the best price available below it. You can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is. If all the sniping bidder are above the sealed bidders then the auction still functions to discover higher prices just not as efficiently.
> this format and you'd have zero activity until the millisecond before bids were due followed by a mountain of lawsuits.
Sure but no one does, the eBay model is a compromise to make the bidding structure more familiar to people who don't understand the second price mechanism. Major auctions don't need to make that accommodation, the audience can be relied on to read and think about the auction structure which is unfortunately not an option you can really take for a mass market tool.
> can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is
Of course you can. You repeatedly enter marginally-higher bids until you crest their limit. The only case where the auction is efficient is if the automatic bidder is the highest and someone else bids up to their maximum.
> can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is
Correct. But eBay doesn't have sealed bids. You can absolutely snipe an auto-bidder; this is like the first high-speed algorithm that was ever developed in the real markets.
> no one does
Literally pointed you to an eBay bidding bot.
> the eBay model is a compromise to make the bidding structure more familiar to people who don't understand the second price mechanism
...yes. The eBay model is a compromise that works for unsophisticated bidders and low-value auctions. eBay's model is a known-flawed model that does not "discover the best price an item can be sold for in a reasonably constrained time" [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42389361
> You repeatedly enter marginally-higher bids until you crest their limit.
That's not sniping. Inherent to last second sniping is you get a limited amount of chances to boost your bids, in the best case you're taking one shot at the bid to place it at the last millisecond eBay will accept your bid. You're trying to get the last bid in on an auction so no one has a chance to respond. Incrementally bidding up to find the ceiling is directly opposed to the goal of having a sniping bot.
> Literally pointed you to an eBay bidding bot.
That was talking about other auction runners using the eBay model for extremely high value items because of the complexity of execution, not about people using bots. I know people use bots it's just that to win they have to beat the bid placed by people using the second price functionality. I'm not denying their existence just questioning how effectively they actually distort the auction structure.
If a lot of different people (using different bots to avoid GIXEN's automatic mini auction) all place their maximum bids at the last second the winner is still the person with the max bid be that a bot user or a pre bidder.
The winning strategy to win that bidding war is still to place your maximum bid in the bot and if everyone does that it's just a normal sealed second price auction. The bot strategy just relies on there not being enough interest in every item and finding one where you can bid less than your maximum and still win which is also true of a pure sealed second price auction. I'm just not seeing where the strategy and outcome differ by including bots if there are second price bidders in the mix bidding their true max.
most people just don't use ... place a huge maximum bid and will only pay the second highest bid plus an increment
The reason people don't do this on eBay is because sellers can have a friend bid on the item to raise the second-place bid more than you're willing to pay (shill bidding). The Nash equilibrium for second price auctions is to only bid the maximum you're willing to pay. Bidding a higher amount leaves you vulnerable to these shill bidding tactics.
> The Nash equilibrium for second price auctions is to only bid the maximum you're willing to pay.
Of course... why would you ever bid more than you're willing to pay? Huge doesn't mean more than your maximum.
Also those shill bids are also betting on being able to perfectly find the point where they are juuuust below your max bid without knowing the actual max bids on the item at any given moment. If they fail they can not pay out but the seller is out their time and any listing fees (depending on the eBay era we're talking about). Conceivably you're still willing to pay your maximum bid the second time an item is available in most circumstances.
Even shill bidding aligns with the goal of auctions to find the maximum price for an item. The goal of the auction is to benefit the seller not the buyer's ability to get a deal. It would probably be fixable by making the bid more binding but that's a separate issue you're still paying at max your nominal maximum price if you win.
> those shill bids are also betting on being able to perfectly find the point where they are juuuust below your max bid without knowing the actual max bids on the item at any given moment
Yes. That or you use one shill to uncloak the max and then another to bid just below it. Worst case, as you said, you're only out your listing fee.
> shill bidding aligns with the goal of auctions to find the maximum price for an item
Which is why for high-value items in a system subject to shill bids, bona fide bidders don't put their actual maximum price into an unsealed (or semi-sealed) system. Which lowers the auction price.
Klemperer wrote an approachable intro to auction theory.
multi-round or not, they should still be equivalent in expected revenue to VCG - no?
> multi-round or not, they should still be equivalent in expected revenue to VCG - no
VCG is second price, so we're already in a sub-optimal regime with a first-price format. (All while illustrating why Vickrey auctions don't work with unsophisictated observers. Could you imagine the shitshow if The Onion won and then didn't have to pay their bid, but Jones's?)
Given first price, I don't think the number of rounds is revenue equivalent.
i agree that if we are doing first price it is suboptimal auction
> “It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,” Judge Lopez said. “Nobody knows what anybody else is bidding,” he added.
So it sounds like the judge specifically had issues with the use of sealed bids.
I thought the other reason was that some creditors were trying to use their debt forgiveness as a credit to purchase inforwars. Which obviously doesn't make sense in a bankruptcy, since the whole point is the creditors are not going to get paid back 100%.
> Which obviously doesn't make sense in a bankruptcy, since the whole point is the creditors are not going to get paid back 100%
The creditors already own the asset. The estate is selling, not Alex Jones.
If you asked every creditor which bid they preferred, which do you think they'd choose? The creditors forgoing their claims obviously prefer one. As for the rest, they'll choose the one that pays them more: The Onion's bid.
This isn't how bankruptcy works in practice, but it's a good shorthand for what the correct answer should be.
> The creditors already own the asset.
The parent comment, quoted above is misinformation.
> The parent comment, quoted above is misinformation
What?
They quoted the relevant portion. The creditors do not own infowars already. A court appointed trustee is liquidating it, the owner has not changed (and will not until it officially sells).
Certain creditors giving up some of their claim can shift more money to other creditors effectively increasing the amount paid out by the estate, thereby satisfying more creditors so it's completely kosher just slightly odd. It's unusual because most companies are just companies and the creditors have less/no emotional investment in anything other than receiving the maximum amount of money from the bankruptcy.
I don't see what emotions have to do with it. If a business has a claim for $28 million in debt against a bankrupt company with near zero cash, I could easily see them saying "we'll bid the full $28 million for the asset X". Presumably the asset X has some non-zero value. Even if comically low (like a single small office building), collecting the value of that asset is much better than $0.
Emotions come into it where some creditors are willing to forgo their portion of the sale proceeds for a particular outcome. That counts as the bid satisfying some portion of the debt and now other creditors potentially get more money from the bankruptcy. The law allows for this, banks do it all the time on foreclosure auctions splashing the bids with their outstanding loan amount making it unprofitable for others to bid and winning the house they can then sell in a regular manner.
Why does the judge care about maximizing the value for a convicted criminal?
It's the value that goes to the creditors in the bankruptcy and is the legal requirement for the bankruptcy process. Jones gets none of this money he doesn't own InfoWars since he entered the bankruptcy process.
A lot of economic and legal theory beg to differ!
Beg to differ about what and how?
Delaware judges seem to have a penchant for that lately. Certainly not a good look.
Also, as a Trump appointee, and given the relationship between Trump and Jones, the judge should recuse themselves.
If this case were an article in The Onion, it'd seem too unrealistic to be funny. Well done, Global Tetrahedron!
Bankruptcy law is federal law, Delaware law has nothing to do with it.
They typically file in the United States Court for the District of Delaware, a federal court located in Delaware. Delaware law plays a significant part in these cases even though they’re in Fed court. Corporate charters, filings, fiduciary duties, property rights, choice of laws, etc etc etc are all determined by Delaware law and used in the federal court.
Federal Bankruptcy Law provides the procedural framework.
So, Delaware law does in fact have nearly everything to do with it.
> Federal Bankruptcy Law provides the procedural framework.
Federal bankruptcy law sets the substantive as well as procedural rules for bankruptcy, and its substantive provisions trump any state law, but, OTOH, state law has some role both in determining what the set of claims going in to bankruptcy are and, to the extent permitted in federal bankruptcy law, setting things like allowable personal exemptions, etc.
Yep! This is all correct. The point remains, however, that Delaware law does have a substantial amount to do with bankruptcy proceedings in Delaware, which is really the point I was responding to.
I may have been wrong to say "nothing" but from what I understand Delaware law has very little to do with it and I don't see how it would be relevant to this particular ruling, but I am always open to learning more as I find the topic of law quite interesting.
This bankruptcy was filed in Texas.
How would the corporate charter affect the fairness of how the auction was conducted?
I don’t know in this case specifically. In the typical case though I’ve seen corporate charters enhance fiduciary duties, I’ve seen them specify auction procedures, I’ve seen them give certain classes certain rights, and most importantly for this case I’ve seen them define corporate governance during the auction sale.
So potentially has massive implications for the auction and its fairness.
There are (AFAIK) no Federally-incorporated firms though
> Seems like the judge is overstepping given Delaware law on this matter.
What does Delaware have to do with it? If DE had any jurisdiction, what law would have been broken?
https://www.dailydac.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/0859-Win...
Talk to Elon about Delaware judges overstepping...
The actual issue is that the winning bid was $7m- $1.75m cash + $5.25m in debt forgiveness. The question is whether that bid is higher than the competing $3.5m all-cash bid.
That $5.25m debt forgiveness would have to be valued at $1.75m or more for the winning bid to actually be higher, but if other creditors are assuming that they will have losses of higher than 66% then the $3.5m all-cash bid would actually be better for other creditors.
Will he keep running do overs until he gets the outcome he wants?
From what the internet says, it didn’t go to the highest bidder.
Put simply, the internet is wrong.
FUAC's offer was all cash. The Onion offered less cash, but offered other incentives (AIUI, a share of whatever revenue they make from Infowars in the future). Saying that The Onion's bid was lower requires you to put a dollar value on those other incentives. The fact that the two creditors (read: victims' families) that would benefit from those incentives were willing to sacrifice some of the debt they were owed so they could benefit from those incentives suggests that at least _they_ think those incentives were worth more than the cash upfront, and the amount of debt they were willing to sacrifice gives you an implicit baseline for that dollar value.
Given the site we're on: it's like saying that an offer with a lower base salary but higher equity is automatically a worse offer than a bigger salary with no stock.
> a share of whatever revenue they make from Infowars in the future
What is that realistically? They said they will turn it into gun safety information. How does a gun safety information site make money out of an audience of people expecting a guy shouting about conspiracy theories?
I don't know what it is. It's an investment, it carries risks with it. That said, if I were one of the Sandy Hook families, turning Infowars into a gun safety site would hold more value than any money you could pay me. Classic case of "maximising shareholder value" not being the same as "maximising revenue".
What that is realistically is irrelevant to the value to the bankruptcy estate - the value to the estate is the amount of debt those creditors are willing to forgive in return for those risks.
The idea that Global Tetrahedron would generate revenue from InfoWars is a farce. Jones is InfoWars. Any market value assigned to InfoWars without Jones explicitly involvement is a farce. Even a non bankruptcy sale of InfoWars would require him to participate in the business for an extended period of time. Even then, it'd just be some investor bankrolling Jones.
That might or might not be true. If Infowars is _that_ worthless without Jones, then _any_ offer is a farce and the whole auction is pointless.
> If Infowars is _that_ worthless without Jones, then _any_ offer is a farce
That doesn't make sense. A genuine offer for an unprofitable thing could be made. That's not farcical, just a bad investment.
Yes, that's precisely what I mean. It might or might not be a bad bet, but the Sandy Hook families are just as entitled to take that bet as anybody else. The idea that it's farcical to entertain any offer that doesn't involve putting Jones back in charge leads you down a really weird road.
Now that you say it that way, it does make some kind of sense.
That seems true for any attempt to continue using the IP for the same thing. Turning it into a parody of that thing might have an audience (and therefore produce ad revenue), would not seem to need Jones involved, and be something for which Global Tetrahedron seems well resourced.
I thought that too, but Global Tetrahedron could just found 'InfooWars' as a satire site without Jones estate involvement at all.
It's complicated - it went to the bidder that would result in the two largest debtors being the happiest with the outcome but that bidder didn't bid the most money in a regular manner.
The structure of the bid was quite complex but essentially the largest debtor agreed to enlarge the share the second largest debtor would receive by supplementing it from their own share due to the awards in the two court cases being so drastically different (basically the largest debtor decided to decrease their own share in that specific bid to supplement the second largest debtor) - this bid was the one that the primary debtor prefers and would award a lot more value to the secondary debtor than the bid that was, on paper, larger.
There are some good detailed analyses of the arrangement out there that would give you a much better understanding than I can communicate second-hand - I'd suggest the overview by LegalEagle[1], personally.
1. https://youtu.be/GmDNz7irGgw
Just navel gazing here maybe there is case precedent or law here.
The debtor generally deserves their case to be discharged resolved liquidated closed and done forever.
Paying ongoing reparations in royalties or whatever the onion proposes doesn’t accomplish this. Alex Jones himself could convert his case to a chapter 13 and set up a “repayment” plan based on his own anticipated/potential earnings from his own business. It would possibly even be higher, infowars intended audience is probably more profitable than people laughing at infowars on Ben Collins bluesky feed.
The people who got a personal judgment aren’t made whole by a promise of future restitution by someone purchasing his business assets.
What if the onion went bankrupt next year and said oh we’re not going to pay that anymore?
That would be an interesting case to test: a person being relieved from a fraud or criminal tort, as it’s handed off to a third party buying their business, who themselves didn’t commit fraud or a criminal tort and merely became insolvent which is dischargeable.
In the case where the “creditors” own the asset to settle their claim, that’s another story, whether they make $1 or a billion dollars disposing of it is no longer the debtors problem
In the same way that returning my smashed up uninsured car to a secured lender doesn’t make them whole for my discharged loan either.
>Paying ongoing reparations in royalties or whatever the onion proposes doesn’t accomplish this.
Sure it does, the Onion would be paying the royalties, Alex Jones already doesn't own it, it's essentially owned by an estate that is selling it off to cover Alex Jones' debts.
> went to the bidder that would result in the two largest debtors being the happiest with the outcome but that bidder didn't bid the most money in a regular manner
The creditors own the asset. If every dollar the creditors are owed voted, which bid would they choose?
The onion bid - by far. If the bid was chosen by creditors weighted by owed value the Connecticut families would solely dictate the terms as they are owed more than 90% of the value resulting from this auction.
> The creditors own the asset
If this is the case, dollars voted are less important than outcome value to the creditors. It is their asset, no? They are assigning value and signaling accordingly.
> dollars voted are less important than outcome value to the creditors. It is their asset, no?
Sure. I’m trying to approximate a metric that gives their weighted interest. My point is the owners of the asset are selling it, and it seems their interests are obviously maximised by one bid.
That’s a lot of text to say “yes, it didn’t go to the highest bidder.“
That's incorrect - it's a lot of text to say it went to the second highest bidder. The onion bid was the one that provided more value to the creditors.
From what I've read, it's not incorrect. Orthogonal valuations are not part of the bid value. This is why The Onion was second (the winner). It was not the highest bid (the considered part). The end.
The Judge has decided that's unfair, likely due to some bias (intellectual, political, etc.)
Yep so that Elon can step in and buy it
This is the comment I was looking for. He said he was going to intervene and something to the effect of “fix it.” This seems like a logical outcome of that statement.
You know, if Elon buys it at the same levels of inflated values he did for Twitter so that the creditors get paid, I'm kind of okay with that. Just kind of. His fix will not go to Jones. Jones is not going away however this ends. Just the brand. He can create a new brand.
>You know, if Elon buys it at the same levels of inflated values he did for Twitter so that the creditors get paid,
He paid $44B. He probably could have got it for less at the time, but if you think it's not worth that, I'm not sure what to tell you. It's literally where all news gets broken. All of it. And he's using it to influence global politics.
Inflated values was Musk's own words, not mine. To the point, he was forced by a court to honor his original higher price than what he wanted to pay after re-evaluating it. Not sure why you're quibbling over the fact that everyone thinks Musk paid an inflated price.
> He paid $44B. He probably could have got it for less at the time, but if you think it's not worth that, I'm not sure what to tell you.
It's indisputable that Twitter was worth $44B at the time of the sale because by definition the price of something is what the buyer and seller agree to perform the transaction.
What's also indisputable is that even Elon Musk was refusing to pay that much for Twitter and tried to back down until he was sued to force him to put his money where his mouth was.
without jones then what good is the brand?
Jones will create his own new brand once this is settled.
So it is more of a question to the bankruptcy court itself, as I would agree that there's no value in Infowars without Jones. So my opening bid to the court is $1.
I doubt elon will want it
Will the losing bidders drop out, or not? In a sealed bid you have to guess what others will bid - you want to bid $1 more than your competitors (or if you will lose the bid make your competitor pay as much as possible). The judge is saying because the bids were seals losing bidders had no clue what their correct bid is and some are likely to have bid less than they would have in open bidding.
Who is right I don't know.
> judge is saying because the bids were seals losing bidders had no clue what their correct bid is and some are likely to have bid less than they would have in open bidding. Who is right I don't know.
Sealed-bid auctions are incredibly common across markets [1]. Real estate. Corporate mergers.
Note, too, that an English auction is revenue equivalent to a second-price sealed-bid auction [2], and here we had a first-price sealed-bid auction with two bidders.
There may be valid reasons to challenge this auction. Sealed bids is absolutely, definitively not one.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_aucti...
[2] https://www.sfu.ca/~idudnyk/Auctions_Part2_Revenue_Equivalen...
I am not disagreeing with anything you have said here. Sealed-bid is common. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't. It is debatable if it is better or not.
> It is debatable if it is better or not
No, it really isn’t. Not with two bidders. The moment the first party announces their bid you have perfect collusion (if the second party, rationally, runs out the clock) or a stalled auction (if running out the clock is impossible, thereby always allowing someone to always claim they’ll bid better).
you need a lot more than 2 bidders for the theory to hold. Repeating the auction just seems pointless, but another avenue could be for the assets to not be sold, and the claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business. Then over time they can potentially see a better recovery than what they are getting from a sale.
> you need a lot more than 2 bidders for the theory to hold
Wrong. Vickrey auctions are well studied in single-item auctions even with two bidders [1]. (They perform between 4/3 and 2 compared to an optimal omniscient auction. Not solved. But not unstudied.)
> claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business
This is Chapter 7. The bankruptcy estate already legally owns the asset, not Jones.
[1] https://www.timroughgarden.org/papers/bk.pdf Examples 4.6 and 5.2
The trustee gets something like 3% over $1million in liquidated assets.
Call it 52,000 from the onion sale.
well now someone says I could have bought it for 10 million.
trustee now gets $300,000. They’re not going to get in the way.
Why do you think this is relevant? (Everyone is ostensibly trying to maximise the price.)
You can test this in boardgames about auctioning: See Modern Art, a game about profiting from art, where you have multiple forma of bidding. Part of the game is to figure out when each auction will provide the most money.
Blind bidding doesn't let people improve their bid, but it also lets someone bid much higher than the second best bid, so it can be extremely profitable in some situations. Compare to a version of said auction where you bid only once, but where the winner will only pay the second best bid plus one.
Uncertainty makes bids go up. Introducing the possibility that perhaps there might be a second round after a bid turned out to be too low reduces uncertainty.
Imagine game theory dynamics in poker if an unhappy player could say "well, come to think of it, I guess I did not really want to see, I'd rather fold"
In a single round sealed bid auction, it’s equally likely that a winner will have bid more than they would have in open bidding since they only get one shot to name a price.
Maybe. Some will do this. Some will try for a deal in hopes that nobody else is bidding.
Elon is going to be the highest bidder if they run the process again.
Maybe Alex Jones will also get a nice contract to sell his vitamins to the US armed forces.
Taking the judges decision at face value here is fundamentally the problem - because it relies largely on Alex Jones as an arbiter of reality.
The judge seems to take Jones, the guy who lost the auction, as the arbiter of what happened. That is a problem and not just because of the strong potential for bias, and not just because the trustee would be a more obvious source of truth - because he ran the auction. Its a problem at a deeper level because the judge seems set on taking Alex Jones as a good faith actor. Every step in the court process has shown that not to be true. We aren't here randomly and this bankruptcy doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Even setting aside that nonsense. THe judge seems confused on the difference between money and value. Thats the type of thing an undergrad gets wrong.
> I think the Judge maybe naive in thinking that re-running an auction will generate more money (normally it will generate less, as the losing bidders will drop out) but he did not agree with Jones' claims.
What evidence are you basing this on?
I no longer remember the title of the paper but it was on the Gordon-Brown-era spectrum auctions. Basically if bidders can obtain information about each others preferences other than via the auction - or in some cases even via the auction - the expected price is lower. I think it applies when a limited number of bidders are interested. If Elon is interested then all bets are off :-)
This seems to me like a victim of attempted murder suing the assailant into bankruptcy, where one of the assailant's main assets is a really expensive gun, and the assailant is still saying how much they'd like to kill the victim with that gun.
Surely there must be a legally viable way to resolve such a bankruptcy that doesn't involve the assailant buying back the gun with funds raised from friends.
You speak practically. Unfortunately the courts do not, and as a result, the courts are suffering a deficit of trust and confidence, nationally.[1] The problems transcend one case and unfortunately they do not point clearly to one answer or a single set of answers. Is it the system? Is it the laws? Is it the people? Why do we get bizarre elevation of form, and results wholly devoid of justice?
[1] https://www.mass.gov/news/supreme-judicial-court-chief-justi...
"no consequences."
This is basically going to be the United States for the immediate future, if you're connected to the right people.
Downvote all you want, but we see it with our own eyes.
When has it been otherwise? See also: Hunter Biden.
It's never 0 or 100. But it does ebb and flow, and boy is it about to flow.
Comparing one guy who was in the hot seat only because of his surname to the incoming shit storm is risible.
Can you point us to videos of other people doing lots of federal drug & gun crimes who get away with it?
They rejected a plea deal. That almost never happens. He was 100% guilty of some things, but they wanted to drag out the whole process for publicity rather than to actually do some semblance of 'justice'.
And some of these incoming people threatened to keep going after him just to inflict pain on his father.
These are no longer the party of Romney and McCain. "The cruelty is the point".
> Comparing one guy who was in the hot seat only because of his surname
There exists boatloads of concrete evidence Hunter Biden was guilty of several categories of crimes, related to drugs, corruption, illegal firearms and child prostitutes.
There’s a reason he had to be pardoned by Joe, right? He essentially created a “the full laptop” pardon, complete unprecedented.
Any other person guilty of half these things would be in for life.
You got it backwards. He didn’t get a shit storm due to his last name. He got a free pass due to it.
The only reason Biden pardoned his son was that Trump explicitly said he was going to use the DoJ for a punitive witch-hunt. No father would ever subject their child to that.
If Harris had won, Biden would not have pardoned Hunter. Likely Harris would've pardoned him in a year or two after he'd seen prison.
> What recourse is left when the legal system is this broken?
I mean, I’m not advocating it, but we saw the decision of a guy who made the news over the past week with a healthcare exec.
> The end effect will probably be even more subscribers and money for Jones
That seems a very foreseeable outcome.
Can’t blame him, that monetary judgement is ridiculous and should be capped.
Why should it be capped? Was the harm dealt to the victims capped at all?
>money for Jones which he will use with even less restraint since he knows there are no consequences
He was fined over a billion dollars, in what world is losing a billion dollars no consequences?
>He was fined over a billion dollars, in what world is losing a billion dollars no consequences?
Parent’s point is that the amount of the fine doesn’t matter if he is able to avoid paying it. It could have been a quadrillion. A fine only matters if you actually have to pay it.
On an average-person-level, some municipalities nearby me have decided to not basically not do anything about parking fines. As a result, there are vehicles that over ten thousand dollars of fine. But they are still allowed to renew their registration and drive their vehicle. So it’s just a made up demerit.
Reminds me of that Russian court that recently fined Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Funnily enough this was along similar lines to the Alex Jones case but in reverse.
Huh, I wonder why they stopped at 20.
They didn't - it was a more modest amount that they put daily compounding interest on. The number keeps growing larger and larger by the day.
Well, that makes sense, at least.
He was fined a billion dollars, but it will never be collected, he never lost a billion dollars. With this decision all his debts are pardoned and he gets to keep his megaphone, that is very "no consequences".
America was founded with a constitution that guarantee's citizens a megaphone as part of a list of inalienable rights (God given per words in the constitution). Bankrupting Jones won't remove his ability speak or muzzle him and it's more than likely only going to give him more of an audience. He'll still be able to voice his performance art about growing babies-in-cows-for-25-years and gay-frogs. He'll more than likely struggle to sell his seeds and end-of-times nonsense and he's probably been debanked. But megaphone wise he'll be louder than ever.
Chemicals in the water turning the frogs gay is an actual thing though. E.g.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3280221/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1501065112
https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/
However
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/frogs-rev...
but, > The findings in no way exonerate pollutants like the widely used herbicide atrazine, scientists caution.
I don't see anything in those articles about gay frogs.
Trans frogs, sure, but sex and sexual orientation are different.
OK. Going on an alex jones rant here...
I was always under the impression that the performance art he did with the frogs was in reference to Chlorpyrifos. And I am in concert with Alex Jones here. I agree with him. This crap is not good, is banned throughout the world, and is a mammalian neurotoxin.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1203396109
https://www.salon.com/2020/12/08/chlorpyrifos-neurotoxic-pes...
But you and I both know he crosses the line (and enjoys doing so) from authentic to clown. He'll bedazzle a libertarian and country boy with quirky strange perspectives that have a kernel of truth and then drag them down into the dark ass netherworld he's living his life in. He spins people up and inflames their amygdala's and connects the dots to some dark metaphysical Ba'al. But then he still comes back around and sells you some seeds and some product to stock your nuclear fall out shelter. He's one part performance artist one part grifter. But he crossed a third rail when he tried pulling the parents of a school shooting into his bi-polarish world. Bottom line with a guy like Alex Jones is that he's always going to connect the natural failure-state of a system (FDA regulatory capture) to some fever dream Ba'al conspiracy vs acknowledging that humans and their systems are flawed and that the natural state of a government is one in which it is picking winners and losers (cronyism) and it's been that way in his country since Washington's soldiers and officers mutinied over pensions. https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-source-collect.... That didn't need the illuminati becuase, like the FDA, it's the natural mode of humanity and a system to fail.
He wasn't fined. He had a judgement for damages against him. They are different things with a similar outcome (he's out a billion dollars) - accuracy is important.
Also - until he actually pays any of that billion dollars, there have been no consequences.
Additionally, it's important to highlight that he refused to properly comply with the legal process - so it was a default judgement. This is essentially unheard of due to how unwise it is.
We can consider his non-compliance an investment in his audience. By refusing to comply, he signals his supporters that the lawsuit is unfair persecution. And they believe him.
His lawyer already stated “Finally, a judge followed the law.”.
> What recourse is left when the legal system is this broken?
Exactly. The lawfare must stop.
They won a defamation lawsuit when what he did was way more than just defamation. He deliberately made the families' lives hell, and did that for profit.
Now that it's public knowledge how low the bids were, a re-auction might attract many more bidders and raise a LOT more money for the creditors. It is certainly not an asset with any appeal to me, but a talented brand and e-commerce operator can likely generate a river of cash flow from the IP/audience for sale here.
> First United American Companies
The second-highest bidder was....an insurance company? Am I misunderstanding?
It's a shell company made to have an acronym that sounds like "eff you AC".
AC?
American Companies?
No, it's a set of straw buyers for Alex Jones.
The second highest bidder was Alex Jones
Who importantly, supposedly doesn’t have any money, because he doesn’t want to pay the families of the victims what he owns them.
and is arguing that the problem with the sale is that the people he owes money don't have any money because he hasn't paid them.
Remember that this was made possible by the intervention of Elon Musk.
I suspect he may end up buying the assets himself or someone in this circle.
This was not made possible by the intervention of Musk. If you're referring to the X Corp objection, this has absolutely nothing to do with that.
Is that asset of any use at this point? Even onion’s bid seems like a waste of money to me
Could Elon or a billionaire friend of his buy it, at a slightly higher price than the Onion offered, and then employ Alex Jones as a host?
InfoWars is worth nothing if not for Alex Jones right. So if you want to maximize value, you need to somehow keep him around to serve his audience.
Alex Jones owes a lot of money after the lawsuits against hi , if he was hired back at Infowars everything he made would be clawed over. Second, Alex Jobes is what his followers are interested in, if he still has any followers left. Anyone else who buys this asset will not be able to extract any value from it.
That idea is disgusting enough for him to try.
This other company is clearly part of the same legal operation and should also be held liable.
https://archive.is/hPq1e
In case that one still cuts off halfway through, another snapshot is at https://archive.is/8q8m8
It only archived part of the article. They want a logged-in user to avoid the paywall.
From Bluesky's Gift Link feed: [0]
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/10/business/media/the-onion-...
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/davidsacerdote.bsky.social/feed/aaa...
And just in case: apparently you can gift the articles even if you only have a free 48/72h subscription from a library, e.g. here: https://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/explore/elibrary/new-y...
This is all totally ridiculous. The assets are only worth a large amount when run as a disinformation outlet for Russian/extreme-right propaganda. Since no buyer is going to do that (see earlier, that gets you sued), the assets aren't worth much.
What a shame
“Judge refuses to allow sales of Infowars to The Onion, allows sale of Super Male Vitality Alpha-Z Colloidal Silver instead”
I really don't understand how a judgement this large can be reasonable in a case where nobody has had his house burned down.
A billion dollars is ten billion crowns, that's 10 000 million crowns, or around 5 000 apartments.
I don't understand how 5 000 apartments can be a judgement handed out to an individual over something he says. It doesn't really matter what he says, when it's this kind of huge amounts. One can't fine somebody the value of an entire town unless he's done destruction of that order, or at least a fraction of that order.
Stealing from an earlier comment of mine [1] in case you want to read the comments.
Alex Jones declared in court that his show reaches about a hundred million people. If that's true then he's paying $10 for every person who heard him defaming the families of dead children.
This would be the same principle as those fines in Nordic countries sometimes that depend on how rich someone is. If you can influence one hundred million people and use that power in a criminally irresponsible way, you get a proportionate fine.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33182728
Yeah, we don't have that in Sweden except for criminal acts, and then the fines are a certain number of days of your income as a substitute for imprisonment.
In civil cases our judgements are usually not enormous.
I don't feel that your reasoning above makes the judgement more reasonable. Maybe he does reach that many people, but he obviously makes nowhere near that amount of money and it's out of line with other defamation judgements.
> it's out of line with other defamation judgements.
This point made me curious so I quickly looked around. Fox News paid a $787.5 million settlement [1] for making false claims about Dominion. Given that this happened as the trial was about to start, it's reasonable to assume that Fox News expected to lose even more if the issue went to trial. And that's for a party that arguably would have followed court orders, something Alex Jones refused to do.
Next in line is Rudy Giuliani, who was ordered to pay $150 million for defaming two election workers [2]. If Alex Jones defamed 12 families then it comes out roughly the same.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/18/media/fox-dominion-settle...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/rudy-giuliani-def...
All these cited claims seem political and extreme to me. I can't find a non-political example where the judgement this extreme.
Depp v Herd defamation was around $10m.
The acts of defamation were extreme, clear cut, repetitive and devoid of remorse. I for one like knowing that if someone ruins my reputation with cruel lies in such a malicious and relentless way that they may face extreme consequences.
There was a single victim in Depp vs Herd.
Those are also extreme though.
> Yeah, we don't have that in Sweden except for criminal acts
Sweden isn't the only Nordic country.
Just look up speeding tickets in Finland and Norway.
How about in a case where libel was relentlessly thrown at families over the course of years, on one of the internets largest and most engaged audiences, leading to harassment, threats, and assault? What should the judgment be for that?
This is a "millions of dollars" lawsuit. Not a 10 billion dollar lawsuit. Alex Jones owes what Reddit as a platform is worth. That is insane.
Good reason to listen to courts the first time!
You just repeated the thing he said was not worth $1 billion dollars, and then said "but isn't that worth a billion dollars?!"
I emphasized that it wasn’t just over words said, but the frequency of, audience size, and actual real world harm that’s taken place as a result. And as other commenters have pointed out, he acted in contempt of the court on several occasions
Have the families needed to engage private security? I wonder what their bills have been.
Several had to move..
The same way that big media organizations get away with this in court.
"This content is entertainment and there's no way that any reasonable person could construe this information as facts." If MSNBC, CNN and Fox News can get away with this argument every time they are sued, I don't see how InfoWars doesn't.
But then again, court cases aren't about facts or truth.
> But then again, court cases aren't about facts or truth.
My sibling in Christ, Jones is paying because he fucked around with courts. He was told to stop by court, and he didn't. He had a chance to defend himself, and he passed on it.
It's very simple. InfoWars did not defend itself in court. Fox news would have. CNN would have. Is it the court's job to defend every defendent?
The amount of comments opining here without knowing a smidge of the details of the case is sickening.
That's not true either though. The default judgment was for not complying with the discovery process to the satisfaction of the court. Other options like perjury charges were available to the court, but the court chose the nuclear option to default against Jones.
Also in many cases courts will allow you to walk back from the circumstances that ended up with a person in default and to proceed with a fair trial. I even have direct experience with this in a foreclosure/foreign-judgments case.
The court could have allowed Jones to correct the financial and web-analytics records and proceed, but it didn't.
I'm not going to dig up the transcripts, but I was following this pretty closely when it happened. If memory serves right, Jones was given several chances to comply with discovery requests and was constantly attempting to misdirect and otherwise disrupt the proceedings. It's not like the court balked at the first weird thing the defense did and immediately entered into a default judgement. I believe the default judgement is the only thing that makes any sense in this case. The courts aren't there to play games with people like Jones.
edit: I dug up the judgement anyways. Take a look and tell me if any of this isn't reasonable. How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21074211-alex-jones-...
> The Court now finds that a default judgment on liability should be granted. The Court finds that Defendants’ discovery conduct in this case has shown flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rules. The Court finds Defendants’ conduct is greatly aggravated by the consistent pattern of discovery abuse throughout the other Sandy Hook cases pending before this Court. Prior to the discovery abuse in this case, Defendants also violated this Court’s discovery orders in Lewis v. Jones, et al. ... and Heslin v. Jones, et al. .... After next violating the October 18, 2019 discovery order in this case, Defendants also failed to timely answer discovery in Pozner v. Jones, et al. ..., another Sandy Hook lawsuit, as well as Fontaine v. InfoWars, LLC, et al. ..., a similar lawsuit involving Defendants’ publications
Parties play games in cases of this nature all the time. Court battles like this can be bitter.
Perjury is a criminal charge. Contempt is an option to. Judges use the lever of jail time to deal with situations like this all the time (again, direct experience here -- a surrogate court judge put two 70+ year old ladies in Rikers for a month for failing to comply with the court repeatedly over years). Going to default was exceptional behavior that nobody shed a tear for because it's Alex Jones.
Edit: To answer your question > How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?
If you're looking to make a political statement, sure none. If you're looking to have a fair trial, there's still steps A, B and C.
Even the fact that he had to fight all those cases for the same thing separately is a deliberate step to fuck him. Then the court treating giving the same data in each trial as a separate offense is certainly cherry-picking.
I'm not really complaining though because the concept of a fair trial does not exist. Civil or criminal. Do whatever you can not to end up in court. It always boils down to who has the most resources and the appetite for battle. Some pockets (like the state's) are near-infinite.
>given several chances to comply with discovery requests
The Jones side claims that these discovery requests were for documents that don't exist. The linked judgement provides no detail on what the specific discovery requests were that went unanswered.
Do you know what the discovery requests were for specifically?
No, I do not know.
But I know that "that document doesn't exist" is a valid response to a discovery request. Silence is not a valid response, even if the document doesn't exist.
(If one side falsely claims the document doesn't exist, the other side then can present evidence to the judge that the document does in fact exist, and that the first side is withholding evidence. If you play that game and get caught, various bad things can happen to you. The judge can look more skeptically at everything you say thereafter, the judge can rule that the other side is entitled to assuming the contents of the document are whatever would be most damaging to your side's case, you or your lawyers can be fined, and your lawyers can be disbarred. Judges deal with this kind of stuff all the time; detecting and blocking such games is a major part of what they do.)
The judgement document does not go into any detail therefore we don't know whether the Jones team responded with "these documents don't exist" or not. If that was their position, why wouldn't they have responded to that effect? There would be no motivation to do otherwise.
The rest of your post is speculation.
skulk updated their post upthread to include an actual quote from the judgment. That says quite enough. It doesn't have to list specifics of a repeated, flagrant, bad-faith pattern of attempts to disrupt discovery; the rest of the record of the case will do so, in detail after detail after detail.
>the rest of the record of the case
Is that not available somewhere? You'd think it would be presented in detail, since this is the key reason for the default judgement.
I haven't really tried since the SCO v. IBM days. But for a federal case, you used to be able to go to the courthouse and ask to look at the case file. You could make copies of anything you want (at their rates per page). Or you could use PACER to view it, if you had an account.
I suspect things are more on line these days rather than less, but I haven't tried lately. If nothing else, you should still be able to see everything on PACER. (If they are online instead of in PACER, there may be a delay time - three months, maybe? But for this case, that shouldn't matter.)
For state courts... I don't know.
Wanted a separate post for this comment --
I have never, ever seen a judge use contempt or a default judgment (against someone represented in court) without directly threatening to use that power first.
>but the court chose the nuclear option to default against Jones.
Institution that is a fundamental part of the establishment and status quo jumps at the chance to shit all over someone who's shtick is undermining public trust in the establishment and status quo. Water is wet. More news at 11.
I don't in the slightest bit disagree, just pointing out that they had discretion and it was still a choice.
Yeah, I think the part that makes this so controversial isn't that they exercised their discretion to screw him, which is absolutely expected, but that the court chose a total amount so large as to be newsworthy and garner sympathy for Jones and make people question the actions of the court by itself. The idea that some singular kook running a talk show could get a judgement that we rarely ever see levied upon major corporations that pour far more man hours into far more definable evil makes people who've never heard of the guy ask WTF.
Not a billion dollars anyway.
But 500k per person maybe, if it really heinous?
If that's the case, I sure hope nobody finds my post history from my teen years, or the history of anyone who was a rebellious teen on the internet in the 2000s.
That's why we have courts and juries, to make these evaluations. Why should your number should be used over theirs?
Because it's obviously crazy. 1 billion dollars is the 588 people's entire life income.
It's just excessive.
Alex jones sold something like $165M in supplements in the 3 years preceding this case… this is somehow the opposite of people complaining that judgements against FB are too small based on the Revenue.
So you're saying the legal system should hinge on the judgement of what random people believe is "crazy" rather than judges, juries, laws, etc. One opinion should outweigh everyone and everything else?
The people who saw all the information and heard from the parties involved made that decision. You are saying they are wrong based on a feeling.
It was a default judgement. No trial took place and there was no ability for the jury to see evidence from both sides. The monetary amount was absolutely based on feelings.
They heard testimony, including Jones'. The fact that they weren't able to see evidence from the other side is because they refused to give any.
Look up "nuclear verdicts". The unreasonably large dollar amount is intentional and not meant to reflect the real value of harm caused.
Yes, but a billion dollars. It's 30x the sale price of Minalyzer, a very cool Swedish firm which was bought by Veracio.
It's a level where, when it is an international case, it makes sense for states to get involved with diplomatic pressure. Surely your legal system must be more reasonable than this, because if it's like this, how can it function?
It wasn't a billion dollars for a single thing, it was awards to 15 different defendants, ranging from ~30-120 million each.
More importantly, you're missing that this was a default judgment - Jones didn't defend himself, so the award is kind of the theoretical maximum. The results aren't comparable to regular court cases where both sides make their case.
Yes, but it's still the value of a whole town.
A legal system must be robust even to weird or peculiar people who refuse to work with its rules and still produce reasonable results.
Why should the system accommodate people who refuse to defend themselves?
I understand that in a system like Russia where dissidents face made-up charges and their attorneys are harassed by the state. But Alex Jones isn’t in that kind of position at all. He has no problem getting legal representation.
The default judgment basically means he admitted guilt by his refusal. That was his choice.
Because such a system creates absurdities.
There are always going to be crazy people and a system must be able to deal with them.
The system is dealing with them: By imposing the maximum possible judgment.
This is dealing with them. It's just not dealing with them in a way that you like.
Nonsense - a legal system must apply the law. Also, Jones wasn't "weird or peculiar" - he repeatedly disobeyed and misled the court.
This is like a soccer match where one team won by fifty goals, because the other team repeatedly committed fouls and then left the pitch, and you're arguing that the referee should disallow some of the goals because you feel in your gut that fifty is too many.
It must give reasonable results, and a 1 billion judgement against individual over something like this is not.
That procedure or rules have been followed is no reason to accept an absurd outcome. An absurd outcome is rather a reason to reject a set of rules or procedures.
And this absurd outcome is partially due to a flagrant disregard for the sets of rules and procedures that came before this case.
The Knowledge Fight podcast covers this case in its entirety and it's clear that Infowars et al. has toed the line of criminal to delay and deny justice to the victims. The legal system hit the end of the road and said "everything owed to the victims or everything Infowars has" and this is the result.
But the ruling was for compensatory damages - that is, the compensate the victims. It wasn't a punitive damages - which would make more sense - basically "You don't get to have your infowars any more".
Compensatory damages is making the claim that the sandy hook families actually suffered $1B in damages.
Same reason Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison for conspiracy charges and CCE. Unusually harsh for those convictions and a first time offender. The point is, as cliche as it sounds, to send a message.
Because damages are easy to calculate - how much money did Jones make from intentionally lying about the victim? That money is the result of him selling their repuation without their consent - the market decided what the value of that act was.
Sooooooooo, if release a YouTube video defaming someone, and only made $0.35 off ad revenue, I only did $0.35 in damage?
Definitely how that works.
If I burn down somebody's house and sell tickets to watch, the damages are easy to calculate! It's just my ticket revenue! THE MARKET DECIDED!
Gotta give you some credit though, you beat out some real competition for dumbest take in the thread.
Well partly true... The part where no one wants to watch your videos seems extremely reasonable.
Unfortunately you veer way out of reasonableness when you compare the crime of arson with the civil law of defamation. Criminal law and civil law are very different things... So much so that im not even sure what you're trying to get at with your analogy.
You do seem upset about it though, and that does make sense... I'd imagine the world would be scary without even a basic understanding of the rules that you're held to. Fortunately this information is readily available... Some review material for junior high civics classes will cover most of what you need to know, and should only take you an hour or two to go through.
It was a Moscow Trials things. Not that Jones was not guilty of this specific crime, he was, but the goal was never punishing him just for that.
"Auction closed. Reserve not met. Try again."
This is kind of bullshit. The Sandy Hook families were a part of The Onion’s bid. They were clearly ok with it.
The court knows it can’t sell it back to Jones or a proxy of, but this decision also allows Jones to continue as if he hadn’t sold. And I think that’s what they’re aiming for
appointed in 2019, gee what a shocker
Probably needs to be settled before Trump gets in?
United States Bankruptcy Judge Christopher M. López was appointed to the United States Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of Texas, effective August 14, 2019. Judge López was sworn in by United States Circuit Judge Gregg Costa on Wednesday, August 14, 2019.
Hmm.
Can Trump pardon Jones? I thought pardons apply in criminal cases, not in civil cases like bankruptcy.
And as a follow on, if the president pardons someone for a crime can those harmed by it still sue the perpetrator for damages in a civil case?
Yes absolutely. Being found not guilty of a crime or being pardoned has no bearing on the evidence that exists which is presented in a separate civil case against you.
There’s no double jeopardy in a civil case - it’s a matter of if someone has a claim of damages.
It's not about pardoning, it's about what US bankruptcy trustee thinks is ok or not ok. Had this happen under Trump administration, I would assume that the trustee would not even allow such a deal to go ahead in the first place.
Trump, nor any other president, can eliminate the court's decision. A president's power would be limited to appointing judges in open positions, so potentially the responsible appeals court (up to the SCOTUS) could be influenced, but not controlled.
> influenced, but not controlled
A useless distinction in practice.
Why, so the outgoing government which lost the public vote can make the decision instead of the president elect ?
Disclaimer, I think Trump is a buffoon, but I also think this kind of thinking is backwards.
The elected government isn't making this decision anyways, this is in a court in front of a judge (one previously appointed by the president-elect, no less).
President elect shouldn’t control the courts but whatever.
You think the current president is influencing this court case?
I posted the same news 24 days ago, it got downvote-brigaded by malicious actors (at the same time they were upvote-brigading fake news that he lost InfoWars to The Onion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160692
>After Jones refused to cooperate at trial, judges in Connecticut and Texas found him liable by default, and juries then awarded the families more than a billion dollars in damages, which Jones is still appealing.
Default judgements usually occur when the defendant doesn't show up. Was this the case?
I haven't been following this much but I suspect the billion dollar settlement will be overturned on appeal as being excessive. They're trying to get what they can while they can.
> I suspect the billion dollar settlement will be overturned on appeal as being excessive
Not a lawyer, but that didn't seem to have happened?
Quote from this article: https://www.reuters.com/legal/appeals-court-upholds-nearly-1...
"A three-judge panel of the Connecticut Appellate Court found that a jury's October 2022 decision to award $965 million in damages plus attorneys fees and costs to families of the shooting's victims was not unreasonable given the mental anguish they suffered due to the lies by Jones about Sandy Hook."
They found fault with a smaller portion of the whole award, and even there not because it was found to be excessive: "the judges found fault only with a portion awarding $150 million in damages under a state unfair trade practices law, finding that should be thrown out because it did not properly apply to the facts of the case."
Just found out he recently lost appeal. He has Connecticut Supreme Court, federal district court and SCOTUS to appeal to now.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/connecticut-court-uphold...
Ok, then I would be very surprised (positively) if it weren't overturned by SCOTUS (if it goes that far).
The damages seem excessive to me. If he were the shooter, it would be justified, but he was not. I'm surprised the appellate court upheld it. Don't get me wrong, what Jones did was pretty horrible, especially after having just lost their kids right before Christmas. The presents were still under the tree. I couldn't imagine, but he wasn't the shooter.
If it stands, it would also set a pretty bad precedent. Trump could sue MSNBC for $1B for their RussiaGate reporting. Gaetz could sue ABC for $1B their View reporting, etc. They would be effectively shut down.
Or maybe it would be good. It would force news organizations to not be so sloppy.
>Default judgements usually occur when the defendant doesn't show up. Was this the case?
Almost. He was overtly attempting to stall the proceedings by endlessly failing to co-operate in discovery.
> I suspect the billion dollar settlement will be overturned on appeal as being excessive.
Why?
He clearly wrote "on appeal as being excessive".
You have to prove damages.
You don't, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages
> Because they are usually paid in excess of the plaintiff's provable injuries, punitive damages are awarded only in special cases, usually under tort law, if the defendant's conduct was egregiously insidious.
Jones had a default judgement against him because he repeatedly failed to comply with court orders and discovery. It probably didn't help that he openly declared on his show that his idiotic behavior was a clever plan to fool the courts... apparently a couple million fools can't keep a secret.
So, I dislike Jones and think his shows are BS, but how can he be held responsible for the actions of his listeners? I haven’t heard it mentioned that he asked his listeners to actually reach out to the Sandy Hook families and harass them.
Defamation is a crime, the fact that his listeners harassed people because of that defamation makes it even worse.
This. A core part of defamation cases (especially from a damages point of view), is showing that the false statements caused harm, and that's generally by way of those statements influncing other's beliefs and actions (apart from harassment, this could also take the form of people being unwilling to work with/provide a service to the defamed party because of said statements).
(Note that it's important that the statements are false, and depending on some details, that either they were known to be false at the time, or that there was a reckless disregard to the truth, i.e. no effort was made to determine if they were true or false. If you state something that is true, or is false but you had good reason to believe is true, or that is merely an opinion, then it's not defamation even if someone harassess them or worse)
Ok thanks. This is what I was curious about. Got it.
Jones was never technically tried for anything. He refused to participate in the trial in a meaningful manner and had a default judgment against him instead.
Oh won't someone rid me of this troublesome priest
It's an immediate consequence.
He is being held responsible for personally defaming the Sandy Hook victims and families.
Thank you. Can you elaborate? Wouldn’t jones stating garbage like the shooting didn’t happen etc. be opinion? How were his statements defamation ? I missed where he defamed the families as I don’t listen to his shows.
IANAL, but the semantics of opinion vs fact are typically tangential to the court's determination of defamation. However, in many cases it's a matter of framing: "I think that ..." prefixing a statement can carry a lot of weight versus presenting it as a fact.
> Wouldn’t jones stating garbage like the shooting didn’t happen etc. be opinion?
Holy shit the last 8 years really have damaged our understanding of what “facts” are.
I don't think anything can ever happen in the US -- that's part of the First Amendment.
I do think there should be some other way that would lead to Alex Jones lose his audience. But I don't see anything happening yet.
Trump and Elon are not nearly as bad as Alex Jones (arguably), and lots of people don't like them, but they have an audience, lots of other people like them, support them and send money to them. If they are not held responsible for things they say, if Trump is aquitted of January 6th, I don't think people should expect much to happen.
Because the auction was a scam, I guess.
Refuses to allow? This is like saying I dislike to like instead of saying I don't like. I would assume there is a different way of writing that.
"Refuse" is an action verb, "Dislike" is a stative verb. The infinitive phrase ("to allow") serves as a complement to the verb "refuse," forming a grammatically correct structure. refusare = deny.
'Deny' is the trivial choice here I think.
“Disallow” is one option, though maybe uncommon.
Not surprised. The deal was on shaky ground -- kind of a secret deal without a process to include all potential buyers. The Onion could still have been the winner in a more public, transparent bidding process, but they didn't do that. Procedural correctness is important, otherwise you would see this, or in some other case, entire convictions being overturned, which is the opposite of what you want to achieve.
The deal wasn't shaky. It was an auction where there were only two potential buyers who actually rocked up. It wasn't secret, it was public. It was issued by a court, including a process where bidders had to submit offers before a deadline. [0]
ThreeSixty Asset Advisors ran the process. As they often do. Tranzon Asset Advisors assisted, as they often do. There were confidentiality agreements and sealed bids... But that's the normal process for selling off assets through a court.
A sealed bid is designed to avoid negotiation, and other processes more easily manipulated by bias, unconscious or otherwise. The bids are unseen between the buyers, and opened at the same time.
There were a "large number" of interested parties before the deadline. However, most pulled out and did not submit a bid before the deadline. Leaving only two.
Some potential bidders, like The Barbed Wire, stated that they pulled out because they simply couldn't afford the expected sale price.
All of this was the exact same procedure for other forfeiture assets.
The Judge did not find any wrong doing by the buyers, but rather lamented that the final sale price was too low. That's it. Not a procedural stuff up. That was followed correctly.
> "I don't like second-guessing trustees," the judge said, but that is exactly what he did.
> "It's clear that [U.S. bankruptcy trustee Christopher Murray] left a lot of money on the table," Lopez said, adding that he thought the process was "doomed" the moment Murray decided to cancel a live auction and call for sealed "best and final" offers instead.
He simply wanted the auction to take longer.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/11/13/alex-jone...
Yeah it is so dumb seeing the shady shit when it's so not needed -- reminds me of that wild Alec baldwin prosecutor
The first auction was illegal and this article should be seen as the mea culpa. The families bid the theoretical future earnings of jones instead of actual money. The trustee secretly accepted, but had to walk it back when it was exposed.
It's like bidding on a foreclosed house with $0 but beating everybody because you say you're going to rent it and pay back the bank with that money.
The first auction was NOT illegal.
The trustee was explicitly granted wide latitude in how to handle the auction, including canceling it outright. [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmDNz7irGgw&t=880