Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Actually, no, the jury verdict on punitive damages is $45.2 million, but that is certain to be reduced before Jones is ordered to pay (there seems to be some dispute over whether a portion of the compensatory damages award is economic or not, and depending on the answer on that, the cap under Texas statutory punitive damages caps would seem to be somewhere between $750k and $1m; even if the plaintiffs succeed in their plan to challenge the statutory caps as unconstitutional and the cap that applies is 10× compensatory, as they have suggested it should be, that would cap punitive at $41 million.)

The $50m is adding the punitive and compensatory verdicts, neither of which are yet part of a judgement he has been ordered to pay.

On the other hand, this case involves 2 parents. There is a larger case in Connecticut that doesn't face Texas punitive damages caps that he has also suffered default on and will face damages, as well as another Texas case.

View on HN

The plaintiffs attorney has talked about this to reporters twice that I've seen

Time 1: https://twitter.com/dansolomon/status/1555308565715451904

Time 2: https://twitter.com/averytravistv/status/1555692735906349057

In the first video (which was from before the jury announced what they though were appropriate punitive damages) says "10, 15 times" compensatory damages, $50m is below the upper end of that. The 10x you quote just seems to be the lower end of what he suggested the limit might be.

The second video discusses what the statutory cap is (they think $750k per claim, $4.5m total)/that they don't think it's constitutional. Also that they don't think this will be directly litigated like it usually would, but be adjudicated by the bankruptcy court.

If Jones can afford to pay any of these figures that it says interesting things about how ineffective deplatforming is and really rather undermines the "big tech is a monopoly!" argument. Most people can't make $4 million in a lifetime, let alone these figures.

He claimed that a judgment of $2M would bankrupt Infowars. But emails revealed that, at times, revenue was $800K -per day-, and the judge asked him to explain how potentially less than 3 days revenue would have that effect.

InfoWars made $800K in one day, not _per_ day. Jones claims that was their best day ever.

Which makes total sense to me... businesses have huge boom days, and plaintiff lawyers will happily imply you should multiply that figure by 365 days.

Even so, let's say that was a 10x day ... the question still has merit.

If you divide it by 20 before multiplying by 365, which is a charitable read to say the least, it would still be an insane amount of money.

Is 20x charitable? For many highly political topics attention varies wildly between times when it is topical and when it is not. And further, some big contributors may contribute zero on most days, and contribute huge sums on one day.

Many political fundraisers bring in large fractions of their income on only during a few key days or events.

Yeah it's definitely charitable because they are constantly selling products to their audience throughout the year.

Jones also made a whole bunch of money via InfoWars merchandising. A lot of it was consumables like suppliments. That's a steady revenue stream.

Keep in mind this is Revenue for a 50-75 person company. Some of his employees will be payed quite well. If they make 100k, the actual employee costs might be closer to 150k after all the government dues. So his employee costs alone could be around 10 million.

And if his pills really are sourced from the top manufacturer, then his claim of 20% profit margin of "food" might be correct too.

What's the source for the amount of employees? I couldn't find anything about that, let alone specifically 50 or 75.

I also think it's unreasonable to say that in a 50 person company that sells junk and makes YouTube videos that the median salary would be 100k. And even if it was, 50 * 150k is $7.5 million, not "around 10 million". The difference is significant considering we're talking about a $2m fine.

Alex's sworn testimony during the trial. He was asked how many employees he had, and he gave these estimates. 75 * 150,000 = 11,250000. I quotes 10 million because it was a nice round number.

Accounting records are going to be subpoenaed eventually if this keeps up.

None of this is a real debate. The "bankruptcy" filings show Jones pulling more than 60MM in member distributions out of these companies.

This was gone into during the damages trial. When he got kicked off youtube his sales and profits from his boner pills went way up.

It's not effective because he was able to build a rabid group of suckers. He always mentioned his website all over and steered people to it.

The problem with addressing Alex Jones and the rest "censored" is that they don't believe ANYTHING they say. Or rather, their spoken beliefs are fluid to suit the argument. You can't convince people there's not a "Big Tech" conspiracy about all these companies being controlled by whatever minority is trendy to hate now... You can't logic someone out a position they didn't logic their way into.

> The problem with addressing Alex Jones and the rest "censored" is that they don't believe ANYTHING they say.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/reminder-wapo-nyt-won-pulitze...

There are 2 attacks that are just not worth bringing up because we all know they are true:

1) [Politician] is lying.

2) [Media Personality] doesn't really believe what they are reporting.

What you say is true, but also not interesting. Anyone who doesn't already know either of those facts doesn't care to know. It is normal.

Is that the link you meant to paste? I don't see the relevance?

I'll give you a hint - it is impossible to do Pulitzer-prize level reporting on a hoax without uncovering that it is a hoax. They knew they were fabricating a story out of nothing. And that isn't a problem, it is celebrated as good journalism.

The only thing that is different about Jones is he is targeting low-class low-intelligence audiences.

Okay I was giving you a benefit of the doubt. But you're literally being the exact type of conspiracy theorist I was criticizing in my original comment.

Well, now I'm very confused. Where do you think the conspiracy is here? I don't think there is one. And the Washington Post doesn't count as big tech (nor does the NYT).

The whole point is that there was no conspiracy, and that those two papers were making it up. Like Jones does and for very similar reasons (people love to hear a good conspiracy theory). conspiracy theorising is a fun and routine activity in the press.

Hey I always have clear facts and reasoning backing up my policy claims. Lies are too hard to maintain, and they're fragile.

This is the "exception that disproves the rule" fallacy. It's like going back to 16th century America and finding the one black guy who isn't a slave, or the one white guy who is, and claiming that black slavery wasn't really a thing, just slavery itself as a general thing.

The title of the linked article has been updated (or the original submission was editorialized against HN guidelines) to "Alex Jones must pay $50m for Sandy Hook hoax claim" which is at least accurate to reasonable levels of rounding.

Caps on punitive damages have always annoyed me, especially for things like the Exon Valdeze or similar oil spills, where the companies nickel and dime out the compensatory damages over years and then with capped punitive damages it barely impacts their bottom lines.

I'm floored by reports on how much money he has made alone, not even touching on the verdict or the case!

It's pretty wild that that amount of money was generated by his news machine, it would be very interesting to see where it all came from... Subscriptions? Sponsors? Yeesh, that's a lot of income. Other podcasters are going to still commit the same offences if settlements continue to under-weigh the earnings like that.

He sells snake oil nutritional supplements and prepper crap, just like most niche male podcasters/personalities.

You can't generally make that much revenue from content alone unless you are like the top .0001% like Joe Rogan.

Who also sells snake oil nutritional supplements and prepper crap…

I was wondering myself about that so I did some sleuthing. This law professor explains that the Texas Constitution provides for "the right of trial by jury to be inviolate": https://twitter.com/heidilifeldman/status/155562807903639142...

The whole Twitter thread has more details but the TLDR is because of the Texas constitution, and the large amount of money at stake, this will almost certainly end up being resolved on appeal in the Texas court system. In particular, to answer the question if the Texas legislature's cap may inhibit the jury's ability to determine the punitive award amount, as the state constitution says they may.

Sure, the judge gets final say but they rarely change these things unless the jury awards something ridiculous like a billion dollars for a broken bone.

> Sure, the judge gets final say but they rarely change these things unless the jury awards something ridiculous like a billion dollars for a broken bone.

Or, say, if the jury orders $45 million in punitive damages when $0 of the compensatory damages were economic, and there is a statutory limit (that the jury is by law not informed of before deliberating) on punitive damages of $750,000 plus double the economic damages.

What’s important about this, is that Jones is being sued in other jurisdictions that don’t have maximum punitive limits.

So it sets an important precedent for Jones (and others), that doing this kind of thing can cost you up to $50 million.

Even though Jones won’t actually have to pay that amount, an important example has been made of him.

Juries awarding excessive punitive damages was enough of a problem that many states capped it.

Seems more likely to me that, in the long run, this will also occur in the remaining states.

Maybe Abbott could redo his tort philosophy if he can shake down the tree owner more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com