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Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

nytimes.com

761–770 of 1001 posts

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#761
post #506

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.

>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).

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#762
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sen…

>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 non…

>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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Says who? It was clearly going to work like that until more lawyer nitpicking intervened about the auction (not the sale itself).

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A worked example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_Lead_(Italy)

A better example in the US is the thousands of innocent black men who have been hanged from a tree because "everyone knows they did it"

If the USA does have "Years of lead" then the quantity and quality of firearms (e.g. military grade assault rifles) will make it far worse.

"Years of lead" in a political sense I mean. In a more general sense, you already are in "Years of lead".

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

These kind of comments don’t help any discussion.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#767

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…

>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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#769

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…

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 a…

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
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