That's probably still a net profit for Alex Jones. According to the documents discussed in court he makes $800,000 a day from his show.
If anything, he probably made more covering his own trial than what the trial cost.
If anything, he probably made more covering his own trial than what the trial cost.
It's almost as if Jones' show is a binary classification filter for chumps https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...
That being said, I don't understand how they couldn't have gotten all general accounting records as part of discovery, and if they didn't why they couldn't force a forensic audit by court order.
4M is chump change for someone making THAT much money. Plus, who knows how much money his nut job supporters are donating to him.
For the amount of damage he has caused, for the amount of pain he has inflicted - 100 days of profit as punishment is nothing.
My hope is that they clean him out of every dollar he has got. But, my guess is he’ll come out of it relatively unscathed. Even a 20M settlement might not be much to him.
There are much bigger problems though - how is he able to get such a large audience? Shouldn’t these social media companies have some responsibility? Why has it taken so long for this case (years and years) to reach the verdict stage? How is he lying freely in court, to the judge, on camera, and not facing any consequences? And so on…
The attention economy seems to be particularly vulnerable to charlatans. Platforms are happy to take their cut as long as those eyeballs are glued and the ad profits are dollars in. They'll furrow brows and play act some carefully chosen words, but these platforms will keep giving clowns a stage, because this circus is the best yet.
The sort of people who make up his audience are, by definition, gullible, so they're a particularly valuable audience for advertisers.
He had previously claimed that profit was 20% of that, when pushed he said 20-40%, but documents suggest it's more like 70%.
Still, that $800k/day was for a week, it can't be extrapolated over the whole year.
That companies would advertise their wares next to such an absolute shame of a man is beyond comprehension.