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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

#671

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

NoGravitas wrote: post #645
thorum wrote: post #638

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#672

Post by AnthonyMouse »

nativeit wrote: post #659
gms7777 wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#673

Post by acdha »

vizzier wrote: post #657
acdha wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#674

Post by akira2501 »

latexr wrote: post #106
akira2501 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> This is dangerously close to making the penalty the loss of his first amendment rights. It’s fascinating (and worrying) how the people who cry the loudest about the first amendment are the ones who least understand it. The right to free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything without consequences. If you’re a deliberate liar who provably lies to profit and harm others, you can and should be punished. I’m…

> are the ones who least understand it.

It's horrifying to me that when people don't like a defendant they're willing to justify almost any reduction of that person's rights in an effort to see them "punished."

> you can and should be punished.

This is a civil case. Why should he be "punished?" Shouldn't he just have to pay a settlement? Why is a billion dollars a reasonable penalty for his actions? Why must he necessarily sell his platform when the platform will make the most money staying in Jones' control? Why is it important to the victims in this case to ensure that a specific owner controls these assets?

> I’m reminded of the Twitter engineer who said

Okay, does that have any bearing on this particular case, or it's details?

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#675

Post by AnthonyMouse »

alwa wrote: post #10
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…

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…

> 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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#676

Post by [deleted] »

ceejayoz wrote: post #608
bArray wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It wasn't $1 bn USD worth of damages done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages is very much a normal thing. > He has been charged the equivalent of the GDP of Samoa He probably did more human damage than all of Samoa's citizens combined.

[deleted]

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#677

Post by acdha »

User23 wrote: post #648
roenxi wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wate…

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…

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#678

Post by jpk2f2 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #590
adolph wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#679

Post by baggachipz »

crazygringo wrote: post #637
baggachipz wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#680

Post by llimllib »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #672
nativeit wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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
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