A bankruptcy judge blocked the trustee's plan to sell Alex Jones's Infowars to The Onion, which had offered less money but a $1.5 billion concession from Sandy Hook families. The judge ordered the trustee to renegotiate, favoring a higher cash bid from a Jones-aligned group instead.
So the most interesting news article of the day today is that the bankruptcy judge rejected the trustees' settlement for the sale of the Infowars assets. And if you don't know what Infowars is, well, you should. It's Alex Jones's brand and supplement company and all this stuff that he created. And then when the Sandy Hook people sued and he lost, he ended up owing a billion plus to these families and declared bankruptcy. And so the trustee has been working to basically sell off the assets to try to pay off the families for the damage incurred to them. And when you file bankruptcy, what happens is the court identifies a person who's a bankruptcy trustee, and they're a lawyer, and their job is basically to go in and sort through the mess and look at all the creditors, the people who are owed money, and what assets there are, and then try to figure out basically the right kind of settlement. And these people are lawyers, they do it. A lot of times they double deal on the way it gets set up. The trustee will not only have their own staff do the work and therefore kind of charge the bankruptcy settlement for that, and then secondarily, a lot of times they get paid based on what they recover. So, and people don't know, but bankruptcy court is kind of the wild, wild west. It is the one place in which we have absolute dictatorship, and the bankruptcy judges can do a lot of stuff and move very quickly. And this is by design, right? Bankruptcy is a natural and healthy thing in a— basically in a healthy, law-driven economy, right? You don't want to have the kind of things that used to happen 2, 300 years ago where there were debtor prisons and stuff like that. Like they'd send people away to jail if they owed money and couldn't pay it. Bankruptcy is a way that a healthy economy goes and cleans that stuff up. So, tile the spectra, our buddy Alex Jones, um, and I've been interested in this case because we did it on our podcast Acquisitions Anonymous where we looked at the assets of Infowars that were up for sale and it's a studio and then like a bunch of urban assault vehicles and a big supplement business. And if you don't know how that works, uh, everybody ends up ultimately selling supplements because it's the wild, wild west. They're high margin and there's no real claim to efficacy in terms of how they work. So if you're buying those vitamins and stuff off of supplements, like, good luck to you. Uh, you know, they may or may not work because they're not FDA tested and all that kind of stuff. So Alex Jones was doing like $30 million a year in supplement sales. And this stuff runs at like 95% gross margin. So he certainly was taking home a ton of bank from the whole thing in terms of his e-commerce site for that stuff. They also sold like a lot of prepper-type things, like weird generators and stuff, like for, for if there was a nuclear attack or something, you had your own generator. So, so basically the stuff went to bankruptcy in terms of these assets, right, of the Infowars brand, the back catalog. The studio, the armored Winnebago, which you gotta have one of those. And basically the trustee got bids, and so he went out and got different folks to bid on these assets and ended up getting two bids. One of those bids was from The Onion, backed by the families of the Sandy Hook victims and Everytown for Gun Violence, like a gun violence prevention thing that Mayor Bloomberg as basically like funded as a billionaire. The second bid was from a company associated with Alex Jones, who was bidding to try to recover all those assets so he could go restart the InfoWars empire again under the same name. And that's where the trustee made a decision. So the trustee made a decision to go with one of the two bids they got. And one of the bids is one that included some cash from The Onion, right, which is planning on taking the InfoWars stuff and turning it into a parody site, basically to, you know, fight disinformation and stuff. And that bid included some cash and a big set of concessions from the Sandy Hook families. Remember, these people are owed like a billion dollars, so they have a lot of, they have a lot of future, future recovery to, to play with. And so that was bid number 1, which was less cash and some concessions from those families. Then you had bid number 2. Which came in from a group closely associated with Alex Jones, which means the people who were investing in him to go buy this stuff, right? And so the trustee decided to choose bid number 1 from the Onion folks, Global Tachyhedron, even though it required and included less cash. And, uh, Alex Jones's bid with his closely associated group had more cash, but of course, like, lesser value because they didn't have the $1.5 billion plus coming in from the Sandy Hook families. So basically the trustee agreed to those based on the sealed process, went with the Onion bid, and then today the group associated with Alex Jones had gone to court and petitioned the bankruptcy judge to basically throw out the trustee's recommendation, and that's what the bankruptcy court judge did. And he didn't say, "Hey, go with the other bid." He instructed the trustee to go back and renegotiate the whole thing. So if you're somebody that likes to walk in a drainage ditch and talk about what's going on with Alex Jones's assets, which for like, if you watch our podcast for like 5 minutes, I have talked about a dream of buying it and using it as the future Museum of Disinformation. But if you're somebody that likes to walk in a drainage ditch and talk about bankruptcy court stuff, because it's just so darn interesting, it's perfect for you because we'll get to talk about, we'll get to talk about it again. So, that's what we know. We'll see what happens with our liquidation of our conspiracy theory site. If not, it'll be entertaining, if nothing else.
