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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

#981

Post by noworriesnate »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #813
pclmulqdq wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fraudulent conveyance may have been the move of the vitamin company itself, but the purchase in bankruptcy wouldn't be a fraudulent transation.

Letting Jones buy back his 'bankrupt' assets using money he fraudulently hid goes against the spirit of the law, even in the purchasing phase. This guy should be living in his parents basement and barred from publishing on any significant media platforms. He's proven willing to exploit victims for personal gain to the tune of the millions of dollars.

Why? The creditors still get paid regardless.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#982

Post by gregw2 »

etc-hosts wrote: post #950
ljsprague wrote: post #837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1.5 billion is more than Exxon paid for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Alex Jones must have been really nasty.

I don't know everything but I visited Valdez once and the locals told me Exxon wrote the 1.5 billion off of their taxable income so ended up not being punished.

The locals are right to be pissed.

But the logic seems a bit flawed... when you spend 2.1 billion in funding and then write it off on taxes, you are not saving 2.1 billion, you are saving YourTaxRate% of 2.1 billion, right?

The environment is lucky that it was Exxon who made the mistake of hiring an incompetent and overworked crew (per NTSB); they had more resources to deal with the consequences of an (allegedly?) drunk captain than smaller firms. I had a PhD relative working at Exxon whose work was halted and spent a year or two of his life working on the mess; not sure if that was part of the 2.1 billion or in addition to it. Certainly there was non-financial opportunity cost not even measured.

Like "Fire safety codes written in blood", the international requirement for oil tankers to have double hulls ensued.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#983

Post by Breza »

sarchertech wrote: post #182
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…

>2x more cash But because the largest creditor has a claim that is so much larger, the minority creditors will actually get less cash with the vitamin company offer. The deal was structured so that the minority creditors would get more cash than from any other offer. The only creditor that would get less cash from this offer is the sandy hook families and they are fine with that.

A very important point. The Onion was going to give $100,000 more to the other creditors than any other bid. That sounds like the better deal. I can't imagine being owed money and having the judge tell me that I'm being forced to get less money in the interest of fairness.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#984

Post by Breza »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #74
wakawaka28 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason. You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth…

> 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…

You are absolutely correct. Matt Levine wrote about this topic in his newsletter the other day. Well worth subscribing if corporate/legal shenanigans interest you.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#985

Post by Breza »

ginkgotree wrote: post #450

For an entire week, I thought this was an Onion parody headline, and didn't realize the Onion _actually_ tried to buy Info Wars. We're living in such an entertaining era. Life imitates art.

Not The Onion meets Actually The Onion https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1gr5jz8/the_on...

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#986

Post by freejazz »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #971
freejazz wrote: post #931

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The debt owed to the creditors...

One reason to have an actual auction is because the liquidation might more than cover the debt and leave the bankrupt person with excess cash. But that only happens if real cash is generated in a competitive liquidation process. The reasons why this backroom dealing stinks are plentiful...

The actual cash is orders of magnitude less than what the creditors are entitled to... did you read the article?

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#987

Post by ThunderSizzle »

hoten wrote: post #642
dnissley wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear I haven't seen a single comment that could be charitably characterized as "supporting Alex Jones". I see a lot of comments that are pointing out that the judgment against him seems unreasonable given the damage he did to these families.

It is unreasonable imo. He deserves to see jail time.

Free speech means protecting speech of people you disagree with.

So what if he claims Sandy Hook was an FBI psy-op. Don't agree with him? Then just walk the other way. The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#988

Post by krapp »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #987
hoten wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unreasonable imo. He deserves to see jail time.

Free speech means protecting speech of people you disagree with. So what if he claims Sandy Hook was an FBI psy-op. Don't agree with him? Then just walk the other way. The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.

>The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.

The vitriol is because the spread of the "theory" led directly to the harassment of Sandy Hook victims by people who believed they were "crisis actors."

Most people possessed of common decency and a moral core would find that objectionable.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#989

Post by paulryanrogers »

noworriesnate wrote: post #981
paulryanrogers wrote: post #813

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Letting Jones buy back his 'bankrupt' assets using money he fraudulently hid goes against the spirit of the law, even in the purchasing phase. This guy should be living in his parents basement and barred from publishing on any significant media platforms. He's proven willing to exploit victims for personal gain to the tune of the millions of dollars.

Why? The creditors still get paid regardless.

Why should Jones be stopped from hiding assets from bankruptcy?

Or why should he be prohibited from profiting from exploitation of crime victims via broadcast platforms?

Regardless of whether victims get paid money, they were harmed emotionally by Jones's outsourced harassment. They don't need money. They need justice in the form of peace from harassment. And Jones seems set on exploiting them and the courts for his own enrichment.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#990

Post by hoten »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #987
hoten wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unreasonable imo. He deserves to see jail time.

Free speech means protecting speech of people you disagree with. So what if he claims Sandy Hook was an FBI psy-op. Don't agree with him? Then just walk the other way. The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.

Intentionally lying to sell ads at the expense of innocent people being targeted and harassed over years is probably not covered by free speech rights in the US.

And if you want to turn this into an argument about the necessary evils of a society practicing free speech, I'll just say that even if it were "covered", I'm not interested in that "right" existing in that form. Though I'm pretty sure willful lies that result in actual, predictable harm is not protected speech.

Don't even know what your last sentences are about. Are you suggesting a conspiracy of some sort?

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