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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

#341

Post by JumpCrisscross »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #332
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#343

Post by wakawaka28 »

munk-a wrote: post #284
wakawaka28 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Let's not discuss "proper processes" when Jones illegally hid evidence and refused to participate in our legal system to the point of getting a default judgement against him. Everything he was accused of he did - he refused the right to participate in our justice system and accepted full liability for his actions. On the point of "any award in the billions (much less trillions, as they initially demanded) is exorbita…

[flagged]

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#344

Post by declan_roberts »

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#345

Post by zeroonetwothree »

nemo44x wrote: post #318
gklitz wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]

And they should also stop doing it.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#346

Post by wakawaka28 »

ternnoburn wrote: post #59
wakawaka28 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Taking the man's source of income is absolutely a way to get paid. He can work a day job like anyone else.

No, it's not. He will not be paying that. He might have paid a smaller yet still large amount, but he's certainly not going to work in McDonalds to pay off $1 billion dollars. He has the same legal rights as anyone else to not be a debt slave.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#347

Post by davidw »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #68
jfoster wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen the filing, but I presume you mean that X filed saying that they own the accounts, right? I don't get why people conflate Elon Musk with the companies that he runs. I imagine he has controlling stakes in all of them, but for the most part he's probably not even a majority shareholder in most of the companies he's running.

You bring up a fair point. In my mind, Musk has taken so much control over X that it's more of a direct relationship than Tesla or SpaceX would be. For this filing, IIRC It was reported that Musk instructed X to step in on Jone's request for help. That feels different to me than GM shutting down a project. It feels politically motivated by Musk's personal beliefs then a decision being made on the company's behalf for…

Even the other companies basically just do his bidding. Remember when he 'shared' engineers around between different companies?

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-more-th...

These are not places you want to invest in if you think there are any sorts of checks and balances on him.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#348

Post by pclmulqdq »

snowwrestler wrote: post #192
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…

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#349

Post by pfannkuchen »

ethbr1 wrote: post #136
wakawaka28 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> mere defamation I think what Alex Jones did is more than mere defamation. Repeatedly lying about the reality of a school mass shooting, over years, in such a way that he caused threats to be made against the families of victims? Incitement to credible threats of violence, and especially continuing to do so even after you're aware that's what your listeners are doing, deserves severe consequences.

I haven’t been following closely - I wonder if the people who made the death threats were charged? I haven’t heard anything about that.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#350

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bluGill wrote: post #340
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-pr…

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).

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