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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

#681

Post by freejazz »

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…

Yeah but in the bankruptcy setting, this would demonstrate that the trustee didn't get as much as they could.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#682

Post by thorum »

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.

Thanks! The archived snapshot doesn’t have that, it must have been added later.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#683

Post by freejazz »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #675
alwa wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Not if they have to put up actual cash...

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#684

Post by braincat31415 »

tredre3 wrote: post #629
braincat31415 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is legal and done in plain sight, then it is not "hiding" by definition. If it were illegal, the court and the lawyers representing parents would have done something about the fact of the sale. Hide: "put or keep out of sight; conceal from the view or notice of others." The fact is that most of complainers here would be laughed out of the bancruptcy court, yourself included. Selling assets for nothing before ba…

In the financial world, hiding an asset doesn't always mean making it literally invisible. It just means making it out of reach to the collector. You can argue about the legality of what he did if you want, but being a pedant about the dictionary definition of the word "hide" just detracts from your main point by showing that you're arguing in bad faith.

Fine, I'll go with your definition. I already pointed out (which you didn't bother to read) that fire-sale of assets before the bancruptcy does not make them out of reach to the collector. Maybe you need yet another definition. Try harder.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#685

Post by alwa »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #675
alwa wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

That's what they did, and that's what was rejected here, right?

Although it sounds like maybe this was more of a procedural rejection than a dispositive one...

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#686

Post by AnthonyMouse »

freejazz wrote: post #683
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

Not if they have to put up actual cash...

Do they though? Put up that portion of the debt owed to them by the estate, which should be valued in at least that amount.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#687

Post by alwa »

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.

It does seem likely to be true, although apparently, based on its bid, his affiliated company sees $3.5 million worth of extra value in keeping the Infowars brand and structure as opposed to going that route.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#688

Post by ceejayoz »

Clubber wrote: post #101
EdwardDiego wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect the billion dollar settlement will be overturned on appeal as being excessive. Why?

You have to prove damages.

You don't, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages

> Because they are usually paid in excess of the plaintiff's provable injuries, punitive damages are awarded only in special cases, usually under tort law, if the defendant's conduct was egregiously insidious.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#689

Post by talldayo »

_zgx0 wrote: 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.

It's Hacker News. I hate to say it, but this is all the website is known for at this point. Bring it up in passing conversation with the in-crowd and you'll get laughed out of the room for using "Orange Site" and fraternizing with drug-addled Elon worshipers and "soloprenuers" that beg for recognition for their dogshit SaaS product. The score has been known for years, the political leaning of Hacker News is basically the same as the "curious individuals" that inform themselves via JRE and random X accounts from Russia.

The people using Hacker News are regularly a stone's throw away from the sort of people that use 4chan. Except Hacker News has usernames and karma so it tends to create cults of personality around people that say what people want to hear.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#690

Post by ceejayoz »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #626
rtkwe wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Showing up isn't what he got in trouble and received a default judgement for was was not complying with discovery. He was required to produce certain things like messages about certain topics and financial records. For some topics they returned no records and later when the full phone record was sent by mistake there were texts with the keywords from the discovery request. Some documents they simply refused to produc…

This is like getting accused of murder, and the judge finding you guilty because you didn't produce knife during discovery, the prosecution said you had. Just absurd. Then skipping ahead to the sentencing, and the judge telling your lawyers that if you testify you're not guilty to the jury, he'll find you and your lawyers in contempt (jail-able offence). While lining up a long list of crying victims to tell the jury…

> This is like getting accused of murder, and the judge finding you guilty because you didn't produce knife during discovery, the prosecution said you had. Just absurd.

To extend the analogy, it helps if you don't subsequently mail the knife you said you didn't have to the prosecution. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alex-jones-lawyers-acci...

> Then skipping ahead to the sentencing, and the judge telling your lawyers that if you testify you're not guilty to the jury, he'll find you and your lawyers in contempt (jail-able offence).

The same will happen to you in any criminal trial if you try to argue innocent post-conviction, during the sentencing phase. The time to argue innocence is during the trial itself.

> While lining up a long list of crying victims to tell the jury how horrible you are.

Again, standard practice in sentencing. Jones is entitled to his own character witnesses, if he can find some.

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