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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

#901

Post by wakawaka28 »

Muromec wrote: post #392
wakawaka28 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Taking away some amount of wages is very much a thing, as everyone who ever divorced can tell you. You better not ask how math works there, because it’s not fun .

As I said to someone else, taking some feasible payment from income is different from rendering someone unemployed. If you took a construction worker's tools, a taxi drivers car, or anything like that, then you put them out of business and render them incapable of paying. As far as divorce or child support, the same principle applies (or ought to). If the worker cannot sustain himself and his necessary expenses, he will become unemployed and incapable of paying.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#902

Post by patmcc »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #888
patmcc wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two groups of families are the only two creditors. The Connecticut families are owed ~$1bil, the Texas families are owed ~$50mil. Nobody else is getting any money. The bid that was accepted would give the Texas families more than they would have gotten from the other bid, because the Connecticut families were willing to give it to them, because they valued stripping Jones of his platform higher than the cash. The…

> Nobody else is getting any money. It is impossible to infer this simply from the size of the debt. Debts have seniority ordering which dictates who gets paid first, just like liquidation preferences in startups.

Sorry, I was imprecise (and not meaning that it was due to the size of the debt alone).

There are 3 sets of creditors that have potential claims in these proceedings, based on what I can find. The two groups of plaintiffs from the different trials (Connecticut families and Texas families, although there's at least one FBI agent that's part of one of those cases too) and American Express - Jones owes them ~$150k in credit card debt. AmEx is not pushing for this money, for obvious reasons (they wouldn't get it, and it would look bad).

No one in this case is disputing that the money is going to end up with the Sandy Hook families. It's entirely the other bidder in the auction that took this back to the judge.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#903

Post by Nemo_bis »

OneLeggedCat wrote: post #855
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.

NYT reporting has been trash for at least 10 years. Anyway Matt Levine, who has as good an opinion on this kind of thing as any columnist, sees it as mostly a technicality, and believes Onion can just submit their bid again. Of course, Elon also now has an outside interest, and can outbid anyone via proxy or otherwise.

Matt Levine quote:

> That strikes me as mostly wrong? One, it is not really impossible to value the families’ claims; they have won judgments in court. Two, “whatever the Connecticut Families decide to do with distributions” obviously adds to the value of The Onion’s bid, if what they do with the distributions is give them to other creditors. Three, it is not so much “a text book example of collusion” as it is a pretty standard case of the biggest creditor of a bankruptcy estate using its debt to subsidize its bid for the assets. It’s pretty normal stuff. > > I don’t know? Global Tetrahedron’s bid was “$100,000 more than anyone else will pay,” so it’s not clear how much an auction would have helped. I suppose now they can have another auction and Global Tetrahedron can just bid $100,000 — or $1 — more than whatever FUAC bids, including the families’ waiver, and win the auction again.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-12-11/the-on... (https://archive.ph/uetH6)

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#904

Post by wakawaka28 »

motorest wrote: post #444
wakawaka28 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Ok then, the lawsuit was settled with an absurdly large judgement. Nobody thinks he has this money. The judgement was derived from the absurdly large damages he was proven to have caused to his victims. If he has no money to compensate the victims of his actions for the absurdly large damage he caused then this means he's bound to declare bankruptcy. > I think it's relevant as to the intent, which is to get a ridic…

>The judgement was derived from the absurdly large damages he was proven to have caused to his victims.

Obviously the amount of damages is entirely subjective. AJ said mean and inaccurate things on his podcast or something and that's about the extent of what happened. No person or thing was physically harmed because of this. There was no doubt some stress involved in being the subject of his podcast, but how much is that worth? There are people who literally get killed or maimed and their families don't get anywhere near this kind of settlement.

>The intent is to ensure that people like Alex Jones cannot cause damages to innocent third-parties. The intent is to bring down legal consequences that match the damages caused to others in order to hold him accountable for his actions. Think: if you are going to constrain damages to your cash grab perspective, you'd be ensuring that those well off would be free to cause damages to everyone around them provided the are not as rich so that worst case scenario they would pay a symbolic fine and change nothing in their antisocial behavior. Do you think this makes sense?

The emotional damages caused to others here are unfortunate but not worth a billion dollars (at least from where I'm sitting). You don't have to go to such extremes to discourage someone rich from doing bad things. It could have been a more reasonable number that can actually be paid over a reasonable amount of time. Making those payments would remind the offender to be more careful.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#905

Post by bad_username »

throwaway10210 wrote: post #898
dang wrote: post #887

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common claim, but it only ever seems to be made by people with a strong ideological commitment who are mad that the opposing commitment isn't banned on the site. In other words, the complaint is that we don't moderate HN based on ideology. Since to do that would contradict HN's reason for existing ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... ), I'm not inclined to start. The irony is th…

[flagged]

I spend many hours per week on HN, for many years, and haven't seen even one instance of what you mention.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#906

Post by Gazoo101 »

hbn wrote: post #241
acdha wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jones continued to inflict harm on families who’d lost children, and profited significantly from it both financially and politically. He defied multiple courts, too, so there was no question of premeditation or incapacity, just repeated decisions to cause harm year after year. That’s the difference: true crime podcasts don’t cause harm on that scale, and few people are going to defy the authority of the legal system…

When was the last time he was profiting from Sandy Hook conspiracies? I heard him apologize for it years ago and say he doesn't believe it. And true crime podcasts definitely do cause harm, the fans of those shows love playing vigilante detective, stalking and harassing people close to the case to get information. I remember a few years ago there was an incident where they were protesting outside of some guy's house…

With someone like Alex Jones, the statement 'I heard him apologize for it' is pretty much meaningless as he demonstrably changes his stance constantly to fit the most useful minute-to-minute narrative for himself.

You basically need to look at the long-term complete picture of how he characterizes his role (I'd suggest https://knowledgefight.com/ as a great source for this) in relation to Sandy Hook.

I cannot recall a specific instance of him apologizing, but I'm convinced he has at one point or another done so. But the number of times he's minimized, ignored, mischaracterized or outright lied about his involvement and impact on the Sandy Hook victims far, far, (FAR) outweighs the actual times he's ever admitted fault and/or apologized.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#907

Post by globalnode »

owlmirror wrote: post #876
globalnode wrote: post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So quite often judges make their decisions based on "feels" and then go out of their way to be nice to the other party so they don't appear biased. You can imagine the poor self representing party that has a strong case but is automatically disliked by the judge for not playing the game properly and basically has no chance.

I think you misunderstood. It is not based on "feel" and the greater procedural leeway they provide the party with the perceived or actual weaker argument is not for appearance sake alone. A judge wants both parties to make their best case and if one party fails to do so, they try to help them along to achieve it.

fair enough, thanks for clarifying that. I did not see it that way and in fact that is hopefully how the system works!

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#908

Post by selfmodruntime »

kristjansson wrote: post #847
selfmodruntime wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a "millions of dollars" lawsuit. Not a 10 billion dollar lawsuit. Alex Jones owes what Reddit as a platform is worth. That is insane.

> Reddit as a platform is worth RDDT market cap today is 29.1B.

But evaluations of the platform's worth are 15 billion dollars, IIRC

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#909

Post by akira2501 »

CJefferson wrote: post #156
a-french-anon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Right, and how do you obtain that "proof of deliberateness"? Or measure that non-physical harm in a way that doesn't give power to people who just don't like what you're saying (possibly the truth)? Most people in favour o…

You obtain it through a court, exactly had happened here. Jones as a deliberate lair, who has ruined the lives of dozens of people who had already had the most terrible thing happen to them -- the murder of a child.

> exactly had happened here

It actually wasn't. The case was decided on a default in discovery and no facts were ever tried. Then the separate penalty trial was started immediately afterwards. The judgement is being appealed, but in Texas, you can collect anyways. If the appeal is successful, then the claimants may have to pay any difference back, or reduce the total amount they can expect to receive from escrow.

I really don't think people appreciate the precedents involved here. Including that one of the claimants is was an active FBI agent at the time and was suing over claims involving his job performance which has never been done before.

> Jones as a deliberate lair

Well, it could be that he actually believes what he says, if so, what exactly should happen then? This was never heard by a jury or judged on those merits.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#910

Post by redeux »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #890
redeux wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So where is justice in this equation then?

The plantiffs getting compensated is the "justice". The courts ruled wrongdoing and the consequence is some sort of payout.

That’s a legal remedy not justice. Justice wouldn’t let Jones potentially buy back the company using money the siphoned off and hid from the court.
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