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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

#231

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

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 as Vickrey auctions [3], but nobody actually does that.)

The bankruptcy estate is selling the asset. Not Alex Jones. The creditors should be deciding who buys their stuff. Not a judge. (The judge is there to coördinate the creditors, not substitute his judgement for theirs.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_aucti...

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sealed-bid-auction.asp

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#232

Post by bluGill »

ajb wrote: post #206
jmward01 wrote: post #42

It is clear that Jones and his relatives have moved money and assets around in order to shield them from the verdict. Now, money that should have been already given to the victims is being used to steal back the megaphone that caused harmed in the first place. The end effect will probably be even more subscribers and money for Jones which he will use with even less restraint since he knows there are no consequences.…

That's not what this judgement says. It actually says the sale did not generate enough money for the creditors and the process should be run again. I think the Judge maybe naive in thinking that re-running an auction will generate more money (normally it will generate less, as the losing bidders will drop out) but he did not agree with Jones' claims.

Will the losing bidders drop out, or not? In a sealed bid you have to guess what others will bid - you want to bid $1 more than your competitors (or if you will lose the bid make your competitor pay as much as possible). The judge is saying because the bids were seals losing bidders had no clue what their correct bid is and some are likely to have bid less than they would have in open bidding.

Who is right I don't know.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#233

Post by [deleted] »

jeltz wrote: post #215
thatcat wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The media is routinely used for psyops to bully people into certain policies for profit using known lies with no accountability, either all media companies should be held accountable for this or none should.

I am totally fine with holding all media accountable.

[deleted]

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#234

Post by ceejayoz »

coding123 wrote: post #57
ipaddr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a debt judgement not economic power. They can sell that debit judgement to a company who collects. They can take the money from the result of the court process and try to buy infowars after this is all over. They don't have a judgement of ownership in infowars they have a debt and the court is forcing Alex to sell all assets to cover the debt. Then the rest is written off and he gets a black mark on his cre…

> And killing the infowars brand means little in the short/long run. The real brand is Alex's name. It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name. This is absolutely true. Other media people that lost their job or channel, handle on various platforms, typically refresh to the same number of followers within a year or two.

> The real brand is Alex's name. It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.

They get to garnish those profits, too.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#235

Post by hobs »

logicchains wrote: post #191
ethbr1 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mere defamation I think what Alex Jones did is more than mere defamation. Repeatedly lying about the reality of a school mass shooting, over years, in such a way that he caused threats to be made against the families of victims? Incitement to credible threats of violence, and especially continuing to do so even after you're aware that's what your listeners are doing, deserves severe consequences.

>Incitement to credible threats of violence Incitement means means explicitly encouraging. Just because someone people made threats of violence to the families because they believed what Alex Jones said about the shootings, doesn't mean that saying "The shootings were faked" is incitement. If Jones had explicitly said "the families deserve to suffer violent consequences for helping fake the shootings", that would be…

Anyone defending Alex Jones in this case is either ignorant, a fool, or an absolute garbage human being.

I am going to pick ignorant in this case.

> “Folks, we got to get private investigators up to Sandy Hook right now. Because I’m telling you this — this stinks to highest heaven.”

> “Why did Hitler blow up the Reichstag — to get control! Why do governments stage these things — to get our guns! Why can’t people get that through their head?”

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#236

Post by lettergram »

pineaux wrote: post #162
cess11 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is correct. People should split intent and outcome. So for example: you going to prison is a punishment. Your wife leaving you because of it, is not part of the punishment, that is an outcome, but it is not an outcome that is intended. The same here. There are damaged to be payed to the victims of alex' Jones heinous lies that have provably made the lives of people that were already victims so much worse. The ju…

> Jones didn't turn up for court and had contempt for the court by ignoring direct orders they probably punished him by making the sum very high.

Just fyi he did, the court kept claiming he had to produce documents / analytics he said he didn’t have. There’s no evidence the documents ever existed, but judge disagreed, so they issued a default judgement (ie no trial).

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/15/1055864452/alex-jones-found-l...

They then had a jury trial to determine damages were in the billions (lol)

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/07/nx-s1-4996347/alex-jones-liqu...

And lost in all this is what jones actually did… which in my judgement is not even liable and we wouldn’t even know because a trial was never held —

https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/here-exactly-what-al...

Which, sure I think is nuts. But I don’t see anything in there besides his opinion and trying to support his bat shit crazy opinion. So what, he thinks it was a fake event. As far as I can tell from this (and perhaps I’m missing something), he didn’t do anything to anyone. If we start penalizing calling people a liar, we’re going to end up in a much worse place where all we have are liars

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#237

Post by acdha »

roenxi wrote: post #227
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…

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…

> 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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#238

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bluGill wrote: post #232
ajb wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what this judgement says. It actually says the sale did not generate enough money for the creditors and the process should be run again. I think the Judge maybe naive in thinking that re-running an auction will generate more money (normally it will generate less, as the losing bidders will drop out) but he did not agree with Jones' claims.

Will the losing bidders drop out, or not? In a sealed bid you have to guess what others will bid - you want to bid $1 more than your competitors (or if you will lose the bid make your competitor pay as much as possible). The judge is saying because the bids were seals losing bidders had no clue what their correct bid is and some are likely to have bid less than they would have in open bidding. Who is right I don't kn…

> judge is saying because the bids were seals losing bidders had no clue what their correct bid is and some are likely to have bid less than they would have in open bidding. Who is right I don't know.

Sealed-bid auctions are incredibly common across markets [1]. Real estate. Corporate mergers.

Note, too, that an English auction is revenue equivalent to a second-price sealed-bid auction [2], and here we had a first-price sealed-bid auction with two bidders.

There may be valid reasons to challenge this auction. Sealed bids is absolutely, definitively not one.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_aucti...

[2] https://www.sfu.ca/~idudnyk/Auctions_Part2_Revenue_Equivalen...

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#239

Post by avs733 »

ajb wrote: post #206
jmward01 wrote: post #42

It is clear that Jones and his relatives have moved money and assets around in order to shield them from the verdict. Now, money that should have been already given to the victims is being used to steal back the megaphone that caused harmed in the first place. The end effect will probably be even more subscribers and money for Jones which he will use with even less restraint since he knows there are no consequences.…

That's not what this judgement says. It actually says the sale did not generate enough money for the creditors and the process should be run again. I think the Judge maybe naive in thinking that re-running an auction will generate more money (normally it will generate less, as the losing bidders will drop out) but he did not agree with Jones' claims.

Taking the judges decision at face value here is fundamentally the problem - because it relies largely on Alex Jones as an arbiter of reality.

The judge seems to take Jones, the guy who lost the auction, as the arbiter of what happened. That is a problem and not just because of the strong potential for bias, and not just because the trustee would be a more obvious source of truth - because he ran the auction. Its a problem at a deeper level because the judge seems set on taking Alex Jones as a good faith actor. Every step in the court process has shown that not to be true. We aren't here randomly and this bankruptcy doesn't exist in a vacuum.

Even setting aside that nonsense. THe judge seems confused on the difference between money and value. Thats the type of thing an undergrad gets wrong.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#240

Post by cess11 »

HPsquared wrote: post #229
cess11 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One is payed to the state, the other to another person, as in one regulates the relation to the state, the other the relation to another person.

What's your view on statutory damages for copyright infringement? "Wilful infringement" has statutory damages up to $150k per work. This is similar. Like this it's a punishment imposed by the state, through the medium of inflated damages.

No, I do not consider damages in copyright infringement a punishment. Whether damages are measured correctly or not in some case or other is beside the point I was making.
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