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Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

nytimes.com

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Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#311

Post by rtkwe »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #6

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 wor…

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#312

Post by probably_wrong »

impossiblefork wrote: post #249

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…

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

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#313

Post by karaterobot »

preciousoo wrote: post #271
impossiblefork wrote: post #249

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…

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?

You just repeated the thing he said was not worth $1 billion dollars, and then said "but isn't that worth a billion dollars?!"

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#314

Post by gklitz »

avs733 wrote: post #273
bastawhiz wrote: post #29

> First United American Companies The second-highest bidder was....an insurance company? Am I misunderstanding?

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#315

Post by HWR_14 »

rtkwe wrote: post #294
a12k wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

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%.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#316

Post by wakawaka28 »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #74
wakawaka28 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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…

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#317

Post by pclmulqdq »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #74
wakawaka28 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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…

In your theoretical framework you can. In real-life bankruptcy court, you almost certainly can't.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#318

Post by nemo44x »

gklitz wrote: post #304
logicchains wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Incitement to credible threats of violence Incitement means means explicitly encouraging. Just because someone people made threats of violence to the families because they believed what Alex Jones said about the shootings, doesn't mean that saying "The shootings were faked" is incitement. If Jones had explicitly said "the families deserve to suffer violent consequences for helping fake the shootings", that would be…

> Incitement means means explicitly encouraging. He was literally, as in literally, comparing the families of the victims to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. I don’t know about you, but if someone has been screaming at me for years that I need to be ready for armed conflict with “the enemy” and then points to someone screaming “that guy’s Hitler”, I would definitely take that as explicit encouragement. But obviously it’s…

[flagged]

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#319

Post by wat10000 »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #51
jmward01 wrote: post #42

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.…

[flagged]

The only thing improper about the process was that Jones tried to screw around with it instead of actually cooperating with the legal system. The judge rightfully came down on him like a ton of bricks for his behavior. Follow court orders and provide evidence when it’s required. If you don’t, you’re going to lose your case.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#320

Post by alsetmusic »

jmward01 wrote: post #42

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.…

> 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.

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