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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

#351

Post by cthalupa »

cess11 wrote: post #142
HPsquared wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pretty large punishment.

Is this some kind of joke I'm not getting? Prison and fines are punishments, having to pay damages is not. When you can't afford to pay your debts, bankruptcy is not a punishment, it's a process to clear out the debts so both debtor and creditors can move on. Punishment regulates the relation between a person and the state and is a part of criminal law, paying damages is part of civil law.

The Sandy Hook families have literally been awarded punitive damages.

Their point is literally punishment. That is why punitive damages exist in civil law. It's what the word punitive means.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#352

Post by impossiblefork »

fenomas wrote: post #321
impossiblefork wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#353

Post by ternnoburn »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #346
ternnoburn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#354

Post by whimsicalism »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #298
rtkwe wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 app…

multi-round or not, they should still be equivalent in expected revenue to VCG - no?

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#355

Post by tomrod »

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…

A lot of economic and legal theory beg to differ!

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#356

Post by rtkwe »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #298
rtkwe wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 app…

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#357

Post by sophacles »

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…

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#358

Post by rtkwe »

tomrod wrote: post #355
rtkwe wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lot of economic and legal theory beg to differ!

Beg to differ about what and how?

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#359

Post by bandrami »

ensignavenger wrote: post #302
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.

Bankruptcy law is federal law, Delaware law has nothing to do with it.

There are (AFAIK) no Federally-incorporated firms though

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#360

Post by declan_roberts »

pie_flavor wrote: post #149
dukeofdoom wrote: post #31

Wait, so you can be fined 1.5 Billion for reporting on a conspiracy theory? BTW, this is a lot more than pharmaceutical companies pay out for actually killing people. I remember watching the trial and it was the most ridiculous thing every. The defendant (Alex) wasn't allowed to say he's innocent because the judge defaulted him. Yet the prosecution was allowed to bring in all kinds of evidence of his guilt (other tha…

Jones repeatedly violated court orders, withheld subpoenaed documents, ignored depositions, and disrupted the trial every chance he got, and so received a default judgement. I don't know where you heard the line about YouTube ad revenue but that's got nothing to do with nothing. Everything that happened was his own fault. He was extended plenty of leeway and he blew every last bit of it. If he thought the amount of m…

I don't watch the trial and don't know anything about Alex Jones but didn't he show up? His own lawyer "accidentally" sent his private text messages to the plaintiff attorneys.

Of course the judge allowed that mistake to be used in trial.

So I think he did show up as least from that memory of the trial.

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