Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There's way too much nasty dross in this thread. No, the topic does not make that ok. As you'll see when you review the guidelines, "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Additionally, the auction here was run farcically, and basically seemed designed to create an outcome where the onion gets to buy this website for no money.
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.
Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...
What you are saying is we should allow a creditor (of many) to sell an asset to whoever they choose at a lower market rate because it's the right political move in this one case. Why wouldn't those rules be applied in other cases.. you can sell any asset for a dollar to yourself and the bankrupt person will still be on the hook for the total debt minus a dollar. Letting a single creditor value assets below marketrate and direct a sale to someone they wanted would be a completely unfair process.
One group of creditors said they were willing to abandon some of their claims, which means other creditors would have gotten a larger share of the smaller bid, effectively making these other creditors better off.
If they get it less, later, or more chaotically, or if that was the intent it is.
This guy should be living in his parents basement and barred from publishing on any significant media platforms. He's proven willing to exploit victims for personal gain to the tune of the millions of dollars.
Or why should he be prohibited from profiting from exploitation of crime victims via broadcast platforms?
Regardless of whether victims get paid money, they were harmed emotionally by Jones's outsourced harassment. They don't need money. They need justice in the form of peace from harassment. And Jones seems set on exploiting them and the courts for his own enrichment.
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 credit report.
There are rules around this process for a reason. If you allowed someone who has a debt judgement to just take over a company what is it's true value. Alex could try to value infowars at a trillion. So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. That's the fairest way for all cases.
Besides others are in line as well.
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.
Except Onion’s bid minimized Alex Jones debt and was the preferred outcome by his creditors. Offering more cash isn’t the same as making a larger bid here.
There’s been confusion on the math. Because one party was forgoing a portion of their share everyone else not just the other victims would be better off financially.
ps: Economic maximization alone isn’t relevant here. The underlying economic value matters when individuals aren’t voluntarily participating in a transaction. If I destroy your car then I owe you based on the cars worth, but if you trade in your car moderately under blue book perhaps you’re just in a hurry.
I think if the creditors unanimously wanted this to happen, it probably would not have been reversed over the idea that there could have been a higher value. The fact that this issue was raised to a court indicates that at least one creditor did not prefer it.
I’m simply agreeing with independent 3rd parties who state that The Onion’s bid was larger and better for the creditors. Alex Jones clearly doesn’t want his life’s worked turned into such an obvious mockery, but while he’d love to sell these business to his parents for 1 dollar but the courts are acting to maximize the transaction’s value. Thus he can only object in terms of monetary value not his personal preferences.
By one creditor agreeing to forgo their debt only if The Onion buys it, that single creditor puts any other potential buyer at a disadvantage. It seems the highest bidder, regardless of whether that is another Alex Jones entity, has a fair counterargument such that this type of sweetheart deal is not fair to interested purchasers.
In both cases the other creditors end up with more money and Alex Jones ends up with less dept. It feels unfair because you’re judging the debt as uncollectible, but they would be receiving more cash from other winners so they aren’t just sacrificing hypothetical money.
I’m sure if a large enough offer was made they would happily walk away with everything they would be entitled to, but losing some cash for a final fuck to someone who profited from their suffering and actively attacked them seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
If A owes B and C money and has to sell some asset to satisify the claim, the only fair way to value the asset is to sell it in the open market, an auction. If D will pay $5 for it and E will pay $500 for it, it would be unfair to both A and E if B waves his hands and say he forgoes his claim so long as D gets to buy the item.
I understand that InfoWars is likely being sold at auction because no buyer was willing to purchase it for a price that would satisify the debt before bankruptcy, but there is a nomzero chance that some buyer shows up and is willing to pay more for it than someone else specifically to keep it out of that particular buyers hands. Strange. Farfetched. Buy possible. And it wouldn't be fair to allow preference by those owed the debt as it defeats the fair market price process.
It also results in debtors getting out of more debt.
> I understand that InfoWars is likely being sold at auction because no buyer was willing to purchase it for a price that would satisify the debt before bankruptcy, but there is a nomzero chance that some buyer shows up and is willing to pay more for it than someone else specifically to keep it out of that particular buyers hands. Strange. Farfetched. Buy possible. And it wouldn't be fair to allow preference by those owed the debt as it defeats the fair market price process.
A blind auction happened and if someone had offered even 1% of Alex Jones debt for info wars they would have won. The specific deal setup by the Onion provided 1.7 million dollars to satisfy other creditors, but the Texas families are owed 49 million. So even if the Connecticut families agreed to accept nothing any deal handing more than 1.7 million to the Texas families would have won.
Further, while it seems impossible for Alex Jones to ever get out of this debt, the Onion deal got him closest to that possibility.
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.
They get to garnish those profits, too.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/alex-jones-cant-avoid-sandy-ho...
> Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to escape paying at least $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his repeated lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday.
> Bankruptcy can be used to wipe out debts and legal judgments, but not if they result from "willful or malicious injury" caused by the debtor, according to a decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston, Texas.
Bankruptcies have all sorts of exceptions like this for fraud, student loans, child support, unpaid taxes, etc.
The intent of bankruptcy law is to benefit the economy by allowing people and corporations to take risks and start over.
It's not to let them get away with defamation.
So there's a line between healthy economic risk-taking (bankruptcy discharges) and bad behavior (bankruptcy doesn't affect that).
It's a chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy estate already owns the infowars assets.
> There are rules around this process for a reason. If you allowed someone who has a debt judgement to just take over a company what is it's true value. Alex could try to value infowars at a trillion. So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. That's the fairest way for all cases.
Specifically, the reason is protecting minority and junior creditors (including the debtor when assets are in excess of debts). If nobody offered up enough cash to pay off the debts in full and there is only one creditor who would rather have the business than the best cash offer, I don't think there'd be any reason for the courts to object. The big issue is, again, minority creditors getting less than their "fair share" of the assets, along with over-compensating senior claims with junior ones outstanding.
Neither are at issue here - The Onion's offer paid more cash to the minority creditors, the majority creditor opted into the deal, and the assets are clearly worth less than the debts.
you'd be surprised how many fall off from a migration. It's no different network effect from anything else. The hardcore will follow, the passive will fall off. Even a cult following like this isn't immune to this (simply more resilient).
>Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...
Based on discussions I've heard on this subject, a subset of the families was pledging money they didn't have in the non-competitive bidding. This is highly questionable. They may never receive the money they claim for the purchase. So by buying a real asset on the promise of money they aren't going to get, it is taking money away from other people who are rightfully owed money. If they wanted to do it the right way they could try to borrow the money from someone, but nobody in their right mind thinks Alex Jones has this money or ever did. The size of the judgement was calculated to lead to exactly this conclusion. As you said, the judgement was orders of magnitude more than the value of his company. So you should be satisfied with that. It is not necessary for the funniest possible outcome to manifest in order for justice to be served. Alex Jones will not go away because he has rights just like anyone else, and the legal process must conclude eventually.
Again, maximimum value not cash.
Is this a legal term or something? Not to be rude, but who cares what you mean by it? It's totally besides the point
Obviously "loosely speaking" is not a legal term but I'm sure there is one that means the same. I mean you need real money to buy things, not bad paper. Bankruptcy does not exist to deliver good feels to people, it exists to settle financial matters as objectively as possible.
Debt can absolutely be sold for whatever it is worth. In this case, the Jones' debt owned by the Sandy Hook families is fairly valuable to Jones' other debtors because it means they get a bigger slice of the bankruptcy estate. Thus the Sandy Hook families can offer enough of their Jones' debt in the sale to make it more valuable. (Edit: more complicated than how I explained it because both sets of debtors include Sandy Hook families)
This isn't any more "imaginary" than money itself.
Sealed bid auctions are not some absurd rarity in this sort of situation and I have no idea why you believe they are.
The auction was indeed very public. The bids were not.
The only requirement to participate was you had to show the Trustee that you were serious and had the means to participate. Only 2 parties did that.
The auction dates were published in newspapers and various news outlets announced that it was going to happen.
Nope. Under the rejected deal, other creditors would have seen a larger payout, because aggrieved families are actual two separate groups. One with a claim near a billion dollars, and other with a claim of only a few million (I think, it may be less).
As a result the aggrieved families with the larger claim were set to basically hoover up all the cash from the bankruptcy, and the deal with the Onion was to create a better deal for the other families by having the larger claim reduced to allow a fair split of the total cash raised.
It seems like there's an easy way for them to do that though: Just bid on it themselves and dispose of it however they want. They can bid arbitrarily high because they're the ones who get the money, if they want to dismantle the company or sell it to The Onion more than they want the money from what would otherwise be the highest bidder.
> 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.
Which implies they might just be able to redo the auction without secret bids and get the same result.
Once the price is known, several parties tend to walk away.
This is why you disclose the current winning bid, which will be <minimum bid increment> over the second highest current bid. If that's already more than you're willing to pay then you weren't going to win anyway. If it isn't, you can put in your bid and then the previous winning bidder has to outbid you again. Which they might do, but you don't know that and until the bid is above what you're willing to pay you don't lose anything by placing bids which as far as you know might actually win.
Although it sounds like maybe this was more of a procedural rejection than a dispositive one...
Except they weren't the highest bidder?
“The total value of The Onion’s bid was $7 million, including $1.75 million in cash put up by Global Tetrahedron, with the rest coming from the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, who essentially opted to put a portion of their potential earnings from a defamation judgment against Mr. Jones toward The Onion’s bid.”
This is regrettable, but I don't think the court system offers a remedy sufficient for the grief Jones caused. This is why the court awarded what is frankly an absurd sum... truly, what is the point of awarding numbers that large? They're never paid out.
There this a strict defamation case, where the plaintiff's reputations were actually damaged in a way that harmed their income/worth, then we'd likely have seen a more rational award. Whatever it was that Jones did to these people, it's not the same tort as defamation. In that, he calls them embezzlers or pedos or something, they lose their jobs... and we can put a number to the damage he inflicted. Instead, he claimed they were actors, they never had any children, and this was some sort of hoax. Had crazy people coming out of the woodwork to harass them and stalk them. But the only sort of court order that could remediate that would be one that muzzles Jones from saying this shit... prior restraint. Something the Constitution wouldn't allow for.
I actually wonder if what he did shouldn't be characterized as a crime instead of a tort. Were he prosecuted and imprisoned (or even just put on probation), then the government would have the authority/leverage to (temporarily) prohibit this speech. Even then, he'd be made a martyr by his fans and it would continue as soon as the sentence was served.
But the logic seems a bit flawed... when you spend 2.1 billion in funding and then write it off on taxes, you are not saving 2.1 billion, you are saving YourTaxRate% of 2.1 billion, right?
The environment is lucky that it was Exxon who made the mistake of hiring an incompetent and overworked crew (per NTSB); they had more resources to deal with the consequences of an (allegedly?) drunk captain than smaller firms. I had a PhD relative working at Exxon whose work was halted and spent a year or two of his life working on the mess; not sure if that was part of the 2.1 billion or in addition to it. Certainly there was non-financial opportunity cost not even measured.
Like "Fire safety codes written in blood", the international requirement for oil tankers to have double hulls ensued.
Wait, isn't Alex Jone's essentially bankrupted by the ruling for the Sandy Hook parents? If he has that much cash to offer wouldn't that have been given to the parents who won the suit?
FFS, it's actively working in his favor right now!
Everything here is state-level. The next president can't touch any of it.
My point is that power is not about what the law says, it's about what people can get away with through their relations with other people.
I agree but the cases are very different. There's not much worth comparing them. It's different kinds of corruption.
Justice departments don't go after presidents or president-elects in order to prevent a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the remedy in that case.
This policy is entirely unrelated to presidential pardon power.
The reality is that we've codified that Presidents are largely unable to be investigated and or held to account by the legal system. There was no carve outs in the constitution at any point for anybody in government. This is a new, and probably fatal invention.
They can be investigated and held to account by Congress. That's what impeachment is. That's the whole point of having impeachment in the constitution.
If Congress fails to exercise its constitutional duty, then the problem lies with the specific representatives that place party above country.
We've seen it fail over and over. They won't investigate their own seriously, and even when they find the grossest violations of law, they cover it up.
The idea that there will be justice by the voters is laughable.
Playing devil's advocate, at least in part...
In practice, he cannot perform many of the duties of the office effectively - or perhaps at all - from jail.
The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and it says he should be President (given the outcome of the process we had). The laws that say he should be in jail are subordinate to the Constitution and so rightly lose out in the minimum way practicable - a delay in sentencing.
...
I do have problems with some of what I've written here, but it seems like a sensible position that could be held unreservedly by someone who disagrees with me on a few questions of fact that do have a subjective component.
If there's a company of which he's a minority owner, they could decide to buy it, and it would be like his brother buying it.
The next thing to do is think about the order these people get to take money in. Debt isn't one pool, it's a set of multiple priority queues. Asset-backed lines of credit typically have a senior claim to that asset but a junior claim to the general pool of money - Alex Jones, if forced to sell a hypothetical car with a hypothetical $1000 loan, will be paying back that loan in its entirety (if covered by the sale of the car) before the proceeds of that sale go to the $1.5 billion debt. Your general accounts are similarly ordered.
The other creditors get more cash from The Onion's offer. It was specifically structured to give better-than-next-offer remuneration to minority creditors.
Correct, it was given up by the majority creditors in exchange for non-monetary considerations (specifically, the moral victory of having The Onion own Infowars).
> It was basically an IOU from one of the families
This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason.
> There was also no transparency in the bidding. It should have been a simple auction, to get the maximum amount of money.
This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.
You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash. Then it gets divied up accordingly.
>This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.
Isn't it telling that the same judge said it was done improperly? Trustees have an obligation to follow standard practices which maximize cash flow or at least don't give the appearance of impropriety.
You actually can, so long as it's the best offer for the other creditors. So long as you can come up with sufficient cash for the minority creditors you're entitled to dispose of the asset in any way you see fit. The Pennsylvania families came up with the cash (via The Onion's cash offer and structuring the payout).
Put it in any other context. Do you think a bank would issue a loan whose repayment was contingent on income from an individual who was seeking relief in bankruptcy? Obviously they would not. The court has an obligation to not accept fugazi money to buy real assets.
I don’t see how they shouldn’t be able to take less money themselves as long as the other creditors also got more money.
This is incorrect - trustees have an obligation to maximize the benefit to debtors. You'll see common examples of non-monetary benefit when it comes to wills - a cabinet that may be valued at 150$ but has immense sentimental value may be given to inheritors even if there is a 200k bid on it if that is what the beneficiaries all agree to.
You are treating debt discharging too literally like a numbers game - there are other important factors and in this case all the debtors were aligned and would have clearly preferred the deal with the lower monetary value.
Probate court is different from bankruptcy court. You can only do something nonstandard if all creditors agree. Some of these creditors are almost certainly banks that are owed money by AJ.
>You are treating debt discharging too literally like a numbers game - there are other important factors and in this case all the debtors were aligned and would have clearly preferred the deal with the lower monetary value.
There are very few sentimental factors in bankruptcy. The few that do apply (such as protections of property with little value) exist to benefit the debtor and not the creditors.
As far as this NYT story goes, they all did agree. It's AJ's lawyer who intervened.
No, that's not the _only_ fair way. Suppose the $2B creditor bids $200M in cash and also agrees to forfeit their share of the proceeds from the sale. Then the $1B creditor would receive the entire $200M, which is more than the $167M they would have received from a $500M cash sale. The bid is effectively equivalent to $600M.
Isn't that what happened in the InfoWars case? The bankruptcy judge agreed that the structure of the Onion's bid was valid; he just said the auction would have continued for more rounds.
Except what if all the creditors prefer that outcome to the "more cash" outcome? If the way it would get divvied up is $499m to you and $1m to me, vs $350m to you and $50m to me (but you get some other benefit that you prefer), why shouldn't that be accepted?
The bid that was accepted would give the Texas families more than they would have gotten from the other bid, because the Connecticut families were willing to give it to them, because they valued stripping Jones of his platform higher than the cash.
The only people worse off are the people who submitted the losing bid (Alex Jones' cronies). The creditors, and the estate, were not. And they're the ones the bankruptcy Trustee has the highest duty to.
It is impossible to infer this simply from the size of the debt. Debts have seniority ordering which dictates who gets paid first, just like liquidation preferences in startups.
There are 3 sets of creditors that have potential claims in these proceedings, based on what I can find. The two groups of plaintiffs from the different trials (Connecticut families and Texas families, although there's at least one FBI agent that's part of one of those cases too) and American Express - Jones owes them ~$150k in credit card debt. AmEx is not pushing for this money, for obvious reasons (they wouldn't get it, and it would look bad).
No one in this case is disputing that the money is going to end up with the Sandy Hook families. It's entirely the other bidder in the auction that took this back to the judge.
That is the most farcical bit. When you strip away all the legalese, the offer was literally formulated as "next best offer + $". That is not a valid sealed-bid offer.
Like you do see the obvious corruption here, right?
You have been lied to.
As I see it, the situation couldn't be any simpler: the oligarchs will take what they want, justice be damned. It was a done deal as soon as Musk entered the scene.
The whole purpose of the deal was to give everyone, except the largest creditor, more cash. Sure the other deal offered 2x more cash, but the largest creditor is so disproportionately large compared to all the other creditors, they would have basically taken all the cash and left little to nothing for the other creditors. The rejected deal involved the largest creditor voluntarily giving up part of their claim, resulting in a much larger (I.e. something like 10x larger) payout for other creditors, despite the lower dollar value on the entire deal.
So yeah, the other creditors are far better off getting more cash. But to do that InfoWars would need to sell for many multiples more than highest bid seen so far.
Yes, but shouldn't that already be due to the victims?
This is worse for the victims, because rather than getting that money, and future revenue, they just get that money.
And this all ignores the harm to the victims, of giving Jones control of Infowars again.
They aren't ever going to see all of this $1.5B. I doubt most even want all that money, what they probably want is for Jones not to be able to keep his mouth piece.
But because the largest creditor has a claim that is so much larger, the minority creditors will actually get less cash with the vitamin company offer.
The deal was structured so that the minority creditors would get more cash than from any other offer.
The only creditor that would get less cash from this offer is the sandy hook families and they are fine with that.
However, the idea that the InfoWars brand is worth less than $10 million is a bit silly to me given its reach among crazy (and highly manipulable) people, and the low size of both bids (and the fact that only people intimately involved in bankruptcy procedures knew when and how to put in bids) suggests that the auction process was probably not run correctly.
There were rumblings that Elon Musk was going to put in a big bid.
The list of things Musk makes noise about but does not do gets a little longer.
(Please note: this is not a case of ∀x ∈ X ¬P(x) ≣ ¬∀x ∈ X P(x). ∀x ∈ X ¬P(x) means "for all x not-P", while ¬∀x ∈ X P(x) reads "there exists no x that P", i.e. there is no party that is happy with the bid, which is either a false statement or not the intended meaning. This is actually a common, but not well-known mistake, so I'm pointing it out.)
EDIT: I even found a reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_quantification
“‘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
Literally started by saying I'm holding judgement until reading the opinion.
My point is simply that if the reason the judge raised for re-starting the process is solely around the bids being sealed, they're wrong in a provable way.
A sealed-bid auction is a bit non-standard in a bankruptcy, but there should be no problem if all the bids get revealed post-facto. I wouldn't be surprised if this was mentioned in the opinion because it doesn't help you say that the auction was fair in light of everything else (if you're going to do non-standard stiff, do it in a very clean-looking way).
Which would make sense. That's not what the article quotes as the judge's reason (nor what you've said).
The quote in the article criticises sealed bids. That's mind-blowingly wrong to the point of having substance on appeal. It's so wrong I expressed scepticism it's actually the case, scepticism based on experience evaluating bankruptcy claims.
I've always been curious -- do you know why?
It's certainly not for lack of familiarity, considering that paying the second-highest bid is basically how eBay works.
And eBay doesn't reveal people's maximum bids either. And so between that and the prevalence of last-second sniping, it essentially operates as sealed for all practical purposes.
What makes it fine in the end is that once you collect all the bids and resolve the legal paperwork you can assign values to the individual bids and compare them which is how people who sell their homes choose what offer to go with. And home sellers do consider intangibles and go with lower-cash offers all the time.
I don't really understand what all the legal kerfuffle is about. Is the court really going to force the families into a sale they don't want when the sale is for their benefit however they choose to define it?
It is 100% not. It makes fewer creditors whole. Simple as that. It's worse for all creditors involved, as per the creditors. Any suggestion that this is "correct" or better is out of ignorance or deceit.
> The other creditors are far better off getting more cash
The nature of the original deal guaranteed the other creditors got more money than they would from the other offer by $100,000 more. Suggesting that they were getting less is ignorant.
> the onion gets to buy this website for no money.
Again, the Onion was spending real cash.
At best your are completely ignorant of the deal.
Not true. The entire point of bankruptcy proceedings is to resolve debt to the creditors.
And in fact, that wasn't the issue that the Judge took here. The judge didn't like the amount, not the creditors bid.
> The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar.
The other creditors signed off on the deal which is why the Trustee took the bid. Alex Jones would have $3.5 million dollars less debt than if he took the FAUC bid. Which is exactly what the Trustee should prioritize, cutting back on Jone's debt.
Can his vitamins possibly be good? Who would buy these over day, centrum or Costco gummy vitamins.
This is weird to me.
Unfortunately, giving the victims no choice in who owns this stuff means allowing it to be reused for the same harm.
Money is not the only variable in the equation. This is not a legal interpretation of the judges decision.
The way you can avoid this with secret bids is to specify that the highest bidder will pay $1 more than the second highest bidder no matter how high they bid. Then everyone has the incentive to actually specify the maximum they'd be willing to pay, because if the next highest bid is lower than that they still actually do want to buy it, but they lose nothing by bidding higher because they only pay a dollar more than the next highest bidder no matter what, and then you maximize bids.
But by that point you don't benefit from keeping the high bid a secret anymore, because of human psychology. Someone bids $100, is the current high bidder and thinks they're getting to buy it, then someone outbids them and loss aversion kicks in so they make a higher bid, even though the first bid was supposed to be their max.
Its a classic maximisation problem something the overblown ai skating community should understand nothing to do with feelings or secret agreements because of that. Should be allowed to buy back goes own stuff minus debt no, but go fix the system if you don't like that...
Isn't that what you want to happen?
All the auctions I've ever participated have repeated this very process until none of the buyers are prepared to raise their bid, at which point it appears the seller has got the highest price anyone will offer.
What am I missing?
Here in Canada, when the market is hot there are lots of auctions withe multiple buyers competing for a house. In my market (Southern Ontario), it is almost always a sealed bid situation, and winning buyers often outbid their rivals by tens of thousands of dollars.
The agents around here are fond of a process engineered to maximize the bids: If there are multiple bids that are all reasonable, they will tell the lowballs to go home, while telling those remaining how many bids are in, and offering everyone a chance to "sweeten up" before a final decision is made.
I personally would never buy a home through such a process, which tells you that I absolutely would love to sell my home in exactly this fashion should the market be hot whenever that happens.
Now that being said, I cannot say for certain whether the frenzy of shouting bids while staring your opponents in the eye will produce more money or the sealed bids will produce more money.
But some people might think, due to human nature, that one auction or the other gets higher prices. Maybe an open bid auction gets lower bids, because interested people start lower knowing they can bid again, then back out when they see there's a lot of competition. Maybe sealed-bid auctions work better for large organisations, as getting board approval and CFO sign-off on a multi-million-dollar expenditure takes a few days. Or maybe an open bid auction gets bidders het up and excited because they're in second place and surely no matter what you've bid, you'd always bid 5% more to win - right?
None of which is backed by theory, but if it feels true to the judge - who's to say?
IMHO the main value of buying infowars, to The Onion, was the publicity and headlines. Those are harvested now. If the auction was repeated I can't imagine The Onion upping their bid.
Surely we could find a professional, whose job it is to liquidate assets after a court decision, that the judge would trust?
If this existed, it should have a name that emphasizes the trust aspect.
> 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.
I don't run auctions but something tells me there's a lot of research behind them that goes into optimizing for this precise thing. It's wild that the judge is disregarding the expertise of the person who was appointed by another judge to run the auction without asserting that the person is not qualified to run it.
The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale.
What's even more crazy about this ruling is he's told the trustee to come up with an alternative solution, that doesn't involve a new auction... But like no other guidance. That leaves the Trustee in a weird situation where the judge has said "I don't like what you did, fix it somehow, but not in a way that uses a new auction".
Frankly, this judge has just been pretty bad at their job. More than a few rulings have been just weird ramblings from the judge with unclear instructions to the trustee and the other parties.
And all this mainly appears to be because the judge doesn't like the amount that Infowars was sold for.
But here's one business law lawyer/professor breakdown of the proceedings that I think is pretty good [1]
[1] https://confrontationality.substack.com/p/bankrupt-alex-jone...
>Jones' attorney Ben Broocks told Lopez at a hearing on Monday that the Onion only put up half as much cash as the $3.5 million offer from First American United Companies but boosted its bid with "smoke and mirrors" calculations.
What Lopez did not like was the dollar amount and how the auction was ran, that's it.
Lopez kept the Trustee on board, though, because he doesn't believe the Trustee did anything wrong (Strangely since the Trustee organized the auction).
It wasn't a false bid, it was a bid that would have relieved Jones of more debt than the bid FAUC put up. Which was accepted by his creditors.
I don't really doubt that judges would bring something up to litigants but I do really doubt the bar would actually do something.
Oh, nothing?
Natural consequences might be that the judge and their family no longer get to go to the yacht extravagant social gatherings, their kids may no longer have an in at their preferred university, or they may have even have the propaganda machine turned against them - potentially endangering them.
There are so many potential consequences that it’s not even worth trying to mention them all. These are all real threats that keep people in these types of positions aligned with the original intent for putting them there.
Real or hypothetical? Still don't see any evidence. FYI it is this kind of posting that goes nowhere, that helped re-elect Trump. People are tired of it and the gaslighting. Hope this helps.
What I’m describing is not some abstract concept, it’s part of human society and I have no doubt you’ve experienced it yourself.
This is actualy quite common with judges. Or so i heard from Popehat who is a practicing lawyer. What is going on is that the judge is feeling that one side is making a stronger argument, in their opinion, and they then tend to give more procedural leeway to the other side. In order to be, or appear to be unbiased. Then commentators or sometimes even the plantifs interpret it as the judge signaling that the judge is agreeing with them.
Supposedly this is common enough that lawyers get worried if the judge is too “nice” with their side.
For starters, one issue here is the Judge is just, frankly, bad at giving instructions. He left how the auction should be ran up to the Trustee who ultimately used an auction company which handles these sorts of liquation auctions. He didn't give clear instructions on what he wanted.
FAUC (alex jones's new company) did not raise any issues with the auction until after they found out that they lost. They had multiple communications with the auction house and the trustee right up until the winners were announced. It was only after they lost that they started throwing a stink about how the auction was ran.
Frankly, it's a bad faith argument by FAUC that's just sour grapes over losing. They were always going to challenge the results on a loss, but it does look bad for them that they didn't do that until after the loss.
Lopezes problem with the auction was mainly that he felt like the amounts were too low. He didn't really explain why he felt that and has left everything really ambiguous (not a good judge IMO). He has left the managing of infowars under the care of the Trustee and has basically given them a "fix it" order with really no clear guidelines on how they are supposed to do that (other than don't do another auction).
Obviously that would add another two years of misery, but still...
Everyone has 2 weeks to file an appeal to this ruling and the Judge has given 30 days for the Trustee to figure out how to fix things.
We'll see what happens.
In any event, yes, likely we are going to see this dragged out like crazy. What's wild is IDK what happens when all the infowars funds dry up if this is stuck in litigation. Bankruptcies aren't usually drawn out like this (and it's somewhat designed to be very streamlined).
> That strikes me as mostly wrong? One, it is not really impossible to value the families’ claims; they have won judgments in court. Two, “whatever the Connecticut Families decide to do with distributions” obviously adds to the value of The Onion’s bid, if what they do with the distributions is give them to other creditors. Three, it is not so much “a text book example of collusion” as it is a pretty standard case of the biggest creditor of a bankruptcy estate using its debt to subsidize its bid for the assets. It’s pretty normal stuff. > > I don’t know? Global Tetrahedron’s bid was “$100,000 more than anyone else will pay,” so it’s not clear how much an auction would have helped. I suppose now they can have another auction and Global Tetrahedron can just bid $100,000 — or $1 — more than whatever FUAC bids, including the families’ waiver, and win the auction again.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-12-11/the-on... (https://archive.ph/uetH6)
"…continue to seek a path towards purchasing…"
"…back to the drawing board…"
The article could have used those details.
-----
[edit] They've updated the article.
Also, @RealAlexJones says "EXCLUSIVE: Alex Jones Responds Live On Air" → is this about two separate Alex Jones, or the same Mr Jones is talking about himself in the 3rd person?
We are deeply disappointed in today's decision, but The Onion will continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured.
We will also continue to seek a path towards purchasing InfoWars in the coming weeks. It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome of this case.
We appreciate that the court repeatedly recognized The Onion acted in good faith, but are disappointed that everyone was sent back to the drawing board with no winner, and no clear path forward for any bidder.
And for all of those as upset about this as we are, please know we will continue to seek moments of hope. We are undeterred in our mission to make a funnier world.
If I understand, it's pretty routine in real estate foreclosures for a creditor to win the auction simply by bidding the outstanding value of the debt. Thus not needing to actually come up with much or any cash. This gains the ability to use or resell the property however you want.
How is one situation different from the other?
In a foreclosure, the senior lienholder usually gets the property and the junior lienholders either get nothing or get what’s left over after the senior creditor gets whatever they were owed.
I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal… it seems they would have had an easy time buying out the junior creditors and then getting whatever they want, although I’m also not sure why anyone would want the “infowars.com” domain and a warehouse full of vitamin pills.
The creditors with smaller claims hate the guts of the creditors with bigger claims, and likely wouldn't sell for any amount of money. Also, I am not sure whose claims have been decided to be senior to other claims (seniority of claims has little to do with monetary amount). Not all types of debt are equal.
The reason is because there were two civil judgements against Alex Jones to satisfy with the second judgement being about 27x larger than the first. As a result, it is mathematically impossible to run an auction that triggers an outcome large enough to satisfy both judgements proportionally and positively. Many members of the second judgement decided to forego any winnings from this auction so as to satisfy the first judgement positively on the condition they would earn a share of ad revenue from the intellectual property in the future. Their primary motivation was not ad revenue or any other form of income, but instead ensuring the concerned intellectual property rests with an owner not friendly to Alex Jones.
That is the reason the Onion won the auction despite offering the lower of two bids, because the larger bid did not positively satisfy the parties to the first judgement.
With that said bankruptcy judges do reject plans quite often and this is a high profile case.
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.
People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue. If you go around tweeting hateful things about the Royal family and the courts find you guilty, don't be surprised if that costs you your freedom. It's pretty simple.
Alex is legally free to saying whatever he wants, but he had the wrong views on Sandy Hook and his wrong views hurt the families affected, therefore he deserves to lose his business.
If I were to follow you around 24/7 for weeks shouting into a microphone is that not illegal?
So people don't actually have free speech.
What does immigration have to do with this? Nobody has a right to immigrate. Pointing out that there have been a massive influx of immigrants in the UK by any reasonable standard, that the majority of the UK population supports limiting/restricting immigration to at least some extent, that the UK does not have the resources to support the current rate of immigration, that the number of rapes in the UK has quintupled over the past 12 years, and that the rape increase coincides with the increase in immigration are all (1) factually true (2) non-hateful and (3) covered by free speech.
> People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue
That's literally the definition of "free speech". "Free speech" does not have clauses for "hateful" or "truthiness".
Additionally, any normal person who thinks about the problem for more than a few seconds can easily see that even if free speech did have those clauses, deciding whether things are "true" or "hateful" in general is completely impossible - it's not that hard to understand. It's also certainly not something you'd want the government deciding.
The arguments made by free speech advocates are not "bogus" - what's bogus is ignorant statements of yours that get the definition of "free speech" wrong and ignore basic knowledge about reality.
His entire business is built on this kind of defamation -- how much proceeds of this kind of business should he be allowed to keep?
So what if he claims Sandy Hook was an FBI psy-op. Don't agree with him? Then just walk the other way. The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.
The vitriol is because the spread of the "theory" led directly to the harassment of Sandy Hook victims by people who believed they were "crisis actors."
Most people possessed of common decency and a moral core would find that objectionable.
And if you want to turn this into an argument about the necessary evils of a society practicing free speech, I'll just say that even if it were "covered", I'm not interested in that "right" existing in that form. Though I'm pretty sure willful lies that result in actual, predictable harm is not protected speech.
Don't even know what your last sentences are about. Are you suggesting a conspiracy of some sort?
The context is that the judge awarded a default judgment because Alex Jones literally refused to participate in the legal system. He committed overt perjury (and was outright caught on this) and proceeded to just stop complying entirely.
If any of us received a court summons and refused to show up or defend ourselves the court isn't going to shrug and say the case goes away. In a system of law you can't just ignore the law and expect the judge to take pity on you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42387916
"View it for what it is: a deliberate attack on free speech. This is essentially legislating from the bench. They can't ban him from speaking but they can make it very VERY expensive to do so, and warn anyone else at the same time."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42385358
"Maybe the “victims” should go after the actual shooter for a billion dollars then.
Instead we have people crying that free speech is the actual evil crime here."
It just goes to show that far too many people have no fundamental values, only political affiliations.
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.
(That said, to a lot of those people, it doesn't matter if the "majority" are left leaning. And for some of those (e.g. trans people), they're even somewhat justified in that stance, since it doesn't make a difference if the harassment they get from being brought to the attention of "orange site" users comes from the majority or the minority)
That shouldn't be a surprise considering how many American libertarian techbros are fans of Alex Jones Lite (Joe Rogan).
My least favorite thing about reading HN, by far. Glad someone else said it.
I think most HN readers are glad that we ask users not to personally attack others (questioning whether they can read, calling them morons and rubes, telling them to grow up, that they should be ashamed, are out of touch with reality, and so on), —or that we ask commenters not to post that women are asking for too much, that European capital rightfully belongs to the United States, and so on.
Is that "moderation based entirely on tone, not content"? I don't think so; I think that distinction is unsupportable. But whether it is or not, it's clear that we can't have people attacking each other like this, and I'm pretty confident that the community agrees.
All a reader has to do is observe your behavior, and it's clear what kind of person you are. You make it obvious by your retelling of your personal judgement of my commentaries here. I didn't realize you were St. Peter, Dan.
So Dan, if you don't want people to think you're an asshole, don't be an asshole. But don't tell me Hacker News janitorial moderation isn't based on tone when the guidelines themselves dictate it.
You're bullshitting every reader here and you're showing every user that you're comfortable opening up your admin tools and regurgitating pinned comments without context to stick it to me, and any other reader who dares question your methodology.
Oh and by the way, thank you for privately downweighting my account and numerous other people's here when I had previously consistently been a top comment in a number of threads. When it was inconvenient for you and a comment had well over a hundred upvotes, it's so nice that you can hide behind moderation tools and just send that comment straight to the bottom of a thread.
Don't lie. I have what, hundreds? Thousands? Of comments here? You thought a single percent? A tenth of a percent? Were distasteful? I've been here for probably 15 years and yeah, you pick on people personally.
It's supportable, but unlike what moderation tools you have, Hacker News' codebase doesn't allow me to pin your comments unless I want them to end up in my general pool. And unlike you, I'm not paid a salary to pour over people's comments online.
Don't do this. You do this bad faith stuff all the time and have for years. Don't lie to me and everyone else by saying sorry and then acting like an asshole the next few sentences. Oh whoops. Sorry, didn't mean to pick on you. Then reading off everything you can.
Really? You think people are that stupid?
The well-spoken troll gets people that are not caught by the meme gifs/jpgs. It requires more work on the propaganda side, but persistence pays off it seems.
Memes alone are not enough to turn most people here, but an account spewing hard-to-disprove nonsense on social media, or someone willing to shill on podcasts tickles the "DYOR" itch.
This feeds back into the comments here and "talking points" are spread.
The irony is that people with the opposing ideological passion—the ones you refer to as techno-libertarian pseudo-intellectual fascists—make exactly the same complaint that you do, just with the ideological bit flipped. They think that HN is (let me see...) full of uber sensitive, far left ideologues [1], not only socialists but delusional anti-socials [2], full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark [3]. Virtually every leftist post is upvoted [4], anything that can be remotely considered right wing is automatically flagged and/or downvoted [5], and only the most extreme progressive positions can be posted here, because I have destroyed this site! [6]
It's not really ironic, because these perceptions are only opposed to each other on the surface—just one bit is flipped, as I said. The underlying mechanisms have to be the same.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160087
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42330143
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41846634
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41851430
(1) there's no such thing as "clear bad-faith" - to decide that would require knowing someone else's inner state. We don't have access to that about each other, and people are far too quick to draw conclusions about it—thousands of times too quick;
(2) usually the person who seems to be in bad faith just has a different working set of information and a very different background than you; they may be wrong of course, but that's not a crime or sin. We're all wrong anyhow.
(3) the only response to "disinformation" that works (or has a hope of working) is to answer false claims with true ones and bad arguments with better arguments.
I can also tell you that HN hasn't much changed since the election. Or if it has, I haven't noticed, or seen data suggesting it. People have often felt over the years like HN has changed since $X, but at most there are fluctuations that revert to the mean. Whatever real trends there are, they're longer-term than that, and determined by fundamentals.
I think it is generally agreed upon that the volume of shared misinformation and individuals believing misinformation has been dramatically increasing over the last decade as preferences in media has shifted.
It would be interesting if the population of HN wasn't following this trend.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I just mean that whatever macro trends we're subject to, they're longer-term than discrete events like an election.
But I think you've read into what I'm saying too much in order to defend yourself and the terrible job you do moderating this website; my position isn't that those people should be banned for their political views. They should be banned if and when their speech has negative real-world consequences. Speech does have consequences, even if it's polite. But you would rather have liars spreading disinformation and bigots spreading hate than be seen as taking a side, so here we are. That's the charitable interpretation, anyways.
> my position isn't that those people should be banned for their political views. They should be banned if and when their speech has negative real-world consequences.
That sounds fine in principle, but in practice it just shifts the language from 'what is the correct ideology' to 'what speech has negative consequences'. Since you can easily predict the latter from the former—that is, if you know what a person says about the first, it's easy to predict what they will say about the second—I don't see much difference there.
> But you would rather have liars spreading disinformation and bigots spreading hate
Same again here: your (or whoever's) definitions of 'disinformation' and 'hate' are functions of your/their ideological view, so this amounts to the complaint that the mods aren't following your/their ideology. It's just a more aggressive way of saying it.
One can be on board with the critique of naive neutrality which you refer to in your first sentence (and which, btw, is so often repeated that, if we're going to call things trite, we should include that one), without agreeing that a community like this must be run by mods who publicly consign themselves to a single ideological box and moderate based on the definitions it dictates. That may be what committed ideologues would like, but the majority of the community would not. It's also incompatible with the intellectual curiosity that the site is trying to organize around, so we don't have the option anyhow, if we want HN to exist for its intended purpose.
> Same again here: your (or whoever's) definitions of 'disinformation' and 'hate' are functions of your/their ideological view, so this amounts to the complaint that the mods aren't following your/their ideology. It's just a more aggressive way of saying it.
This sounds to me like a slippery slope argument (or perhaps an argument for a strong form of moral relativism): because someone, somewhere might disagree that something is misinformation, it's actually impossible (or maybe just undesirable) to definitively say something is or isn't that. There are certainly gray areas and practical limits (I'd be totally incapable of judging whether any article on chemistry contains disinformation, for example). That's not a reason not to try.
Optimizing the site for "intellectual curiosity", narrowly defined as a _free marketplace of ideas_, is itself a strong ideological commitment. Intellectual curiosity is absolutely good, but restricting misinformation and hate significantly improves the signal to noise ratio of that discussion. I understand the fear that fringe points of view with merit might be drowned out, since historically some things we now broadly regard as true were fringe positions.
But at the same time the quality of discussion here is through the floor when certain topics come up because large volumes of people who know nothing on the subject are simply regurgitating culture war nonsense and abusing the voting system to prevent actual knowledge on the subject from spreading. This site ends up just being another avenue for bad-faith argumentation and outright lies to drown out the truth. This is especially obvious when discussions on some minorities happen: because the people spreading outright lies or repeating culture war talking points are numerous, loud, and _polite_, actual discussion is utterly impossible. The moderation policy serves to provide a shield to bad-faith actors (for example, through "just asking questions"[1]) while silencing those who are actually intellectually curious through inaction.
For a concrete example, some of the most curious and intelligent people I know happen to be transgender. The subject of transgender people is one of the worst topics on this site right now because that group is the scapegoat du jour for the far right. When those people try to argue against commonplace lies and share actual information, they're shut down through the voting system and are outnumbered. They're subject to being called all sorts of horrible, false things... politely and indirectly. As such, they've left. The quality of discussion everywhere goes down, anyone _actually_ curious about the subject only has the loudest but wrong opinions available, and my friends end up feeling isolated and hated. Who benefits from that? Not those of us interested in good discussion. Only the people spreading misinformation for their own political purposes and people who have more emotionally invested in the idea of a free marketplace of ideas than in the truth.
Anyways, I realize your opinion on the matter is unchangeable. I just wish that the site were more honest about its own strong ideological commitments.
One thing is, I personally wouldn't put the HN concept of "optimizing for intellectual curiosity" anywhere near the phrase "free marketplace of ideas". The word "marketplace" has many associations, some of which are inimical to what we want here. Ditto for "free". Neither word belongs to, let's call it, the domain language of HN moderation (and I could even say bad things about "ideas").
For me, "optimizing for intellectual curiosity" has to do with (1) learning from each other (which implies community, and a marketplace is not a community); and above all, (2) avoiding tedious repetition. The problem with political and ideological battle (on HN) is that it falls on the undesirable side of both lines: its endless hammering of talking points is repetitive; and its pitch of high indignation is destructive to openness and curiosity. If this is a 2x2 matrix, that's the bad/bad quadrant—and note that it's the bad/bad quadrant regardless of which ideology generates the content.
Another thing is, this community has lots of transgender members, they're as welcome as anyone, and some who I know of make some of the best contributions to the site. We don't tolerate slurs or abuse, and warn and/or ban accounts that post those. The community also does a good job of flagging them. Some stick around for a while, but people are welcome to (and do) email hn@ycombinator.com when they see them, and we always follow up. The topic, of course, is fraught on HN, just as in society at large, and people inevitably have conflicting ideas about what constitutes a slur or an abuse as opposed to, say, a wrong opinion. But I don't believe the site is as bad as you say it is on this front. If it is, then there are a lot of posts going unflagged and unmoderated that I'm unaware of.
Last thing is, what does 'misinformation' mean if not 'falsehood'? But then you're asking mods to decide what's true vs. what's false and impose those decisions—which strikes me as absurd. How on earth would we do that? We don't have a truth meter [1, 2]. We have our views about what's true vs. false like anyone does, but I'm not so hubristic as to imagine that my views are the correct ones and wield power with them. That is the worst quality I can imagine in a moderator, and the thing the community would most reject. (I'm also not so hubristic as to imagine that I don't do that, unintentionally—at most I can say that I've spent 10 years trying to get better at not doing it, and practice has an effect.)
Eager ideologues of every flavour say "you don't have a misinformation meter? no problem - use mine!" But the power to decide and enforce what counts as misinformation is literally the power to decide what's true and thereby control the site. Now I'm repeating what I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42418981 and we're in a cycle.
Moderation, at least as I understand it on HN, simply can't work on such principles (deciding contentious questions by decree). It needs principles on a different level that can foster the kind of community and discussion that has a chance of remaining curious, and then maybe the community can do the job of figuring out what's true vs. false together.
That doesn't mean I'm reducing this to relativism and I suspect if we were to look at a list of borderline posts together, we'd end up agreeing about many. Maybe most. I don't want culture war talking points, for example, or just-asking-questions baiting, any more than you do. But I want grounds for saying "we don't want that here" other than "you are wrong according to my ideology"—and indeed, I don't want culture war talking points or just-asking-questions baiting in any direction. It's not as if it's ok for curiosity one way and then not ok if you flip an ideological bit.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38787789
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That not what he built his business on. That was one (bad) thing he did.
> attacking *people* with bald face lies and using the generated outrage to sell snake oil.
You made a specific claim, were refuted because that specific claim is clearly false, and now you've made a general claim while presenting it as if it's the same as the specific claim. This is not intellectually honest.
I think it's intellectually dishonest to suggest Jones faced consequences because of one bad action. I have stronger words for it honestly but I'm trying to stick to the rules of this forum.
This whole thread only shows me it's time for me to leave HN. You're welcome to it.
This is false, as he obviously didn't build his operation solely on his claims about Sandy Hook as you claimed. The other comment pointed this out, so you changed what you were saying without admitting what you said was inaccurate. Now you are bizarrely claiming that you didn't say what you said, even though everyone can read what you wrote. Alex Jones was sued because of what he said about Sandy Hook, he was not sued for these other actions which were not relevant to the case. Whatever you think about Jones, it doesn't do anyone any good to portray the Sandy Hook case as being about other things.
I sure could have been clearer. But what exactly are you saying? That he didn't build his business this way? Or are you just trying to attack the words I used.
What are you hoping to accomplish by parsing my words technically?
>> Whatever you think about Jones, it doesn't do anyone any good to portray the Sandy Hook case as being about other things.
What do you mean? My whole point is that Sandy Hook is not different from what Jones did every single day, and you don't seem willing to disagree with me. You just seem to want to parse my words.
Why? What exactly is your point here? Why are you arguing this specific turn of phrase? Unless you think that Alex Jones is a voice you want to hear and protect. Why don't you just say that?
I do not find anything shocking about Jones support in this post. A great social mistake has been thinking that people supporting nefarious stuff or shady, disgusting, and pathetic people do not know any better - but they do. Thing is - that is exactly what they want!
And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
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 the way he did.
It makes sense that Jones would lose the case, but the scale of the judgements was eye watering and is difficult to justify. The scale of the compensation is in a different world to the amount of damage done (intentionally, the bulk is punative). That changes the nature of what is going on.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox...
The situation is different in cases where the truth isn’t clear or where supporting evidence turns out to be fake because in those cases a real journalistic organization will retract or update their story. Had either of them been willing to do so, they almost certainly wouldn’t have even been sued. The Sandy Hook settlement was so large because it was obvious that Jones simply wasn’t going to leave the victims alone.
Second, elections are systems, not individual voting machines. Someone being able to tamper with unlimited physical access is not the same as being able to do so in an actual election (e.g. your bank’s PC probably aren’t perfect either but you can’t just sit down and start hacking them), and that’s only a small part of the actual system - as a simple example, if someone could make it record a vote for a different candidate than you tapped, it’d be caught by your review of the paper ballot which is actually counted. If they messed with the counting system, a hand recount would show huge discrepancies.
The underlying thing to remember here is that nobody seriously believed there was a problem. They started backwards from the desire to pretend Trump didn’t lose and repeated conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory as needed to say that outcome was real. That’s why they lost the lawsuit because it was clear that it was essentially political advertising pretending to be news, with complete disregard for the truth. That also forced the lawsuit since left unchallenged the smear campaign would have harmed Dominion’s business, whereas if there’d been anything factual the company would have been compelled to fix a real problem.
They're telling him to stop. That's what the judgement really is. He refused to defend himself in court and he's been told that he needs to stop. And you need to stop carrying water for him unless you can point to a single specific thing that the court did to him that was not fair, and making vague and uninformed statements about the big picture result doesn't count.
Again, for the 2nd time, its not what he's done, it's that he's ignoring everyone telling him to stop, including the government. I don't know what you expect the punishment for that to be. If it were you or I we would have had our asses dragged into prison a long time ago. He's only gotten this far because of his money.
He could be go to court every day of his life, lie continuously, fight them every step of the way and it still wouldn't do a level of harm that justify some of the payouts. They are huge, numbers have been tossed around in the range of billions. The engineering value of an entire human life is only around the 10 million mark. And the courts agree with a lot of that because these are punitive damages, so it is very much a judgement call about what is appropriate. It doesn't look like the judges are doing a great job on that front. The punishments are too extreme; from the outside it looks like Jones targeting these people was the best thing that ever happened to them by a wide margin.
As a single human being, he's literally not capable of suffering as much as the bereaved relatives of a classroom full of murdered children, shortly afterwards made the targets often by name and photo of the most insane people in the country.
> Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history.
Is this even an argument? They get sued all the time, and lose. They haven't ever viciously and endlessly gone after the parents of a classroom full of dead children. They did go after Richard Jewell and Steven J. Hatfill, though.
This is obviously a massive abuse of the justice system, violating the maxim that the law does not compel the impossible. But, since the prevailing opinion (including both judge and jury) observably is "enh, fuck that guy" nobody much cares. However the shoe is going to be on the other foot sooner or later. It may be that hounding Alex Jones wasn't worth the precedent (making this style of lawfare acceptable, not an actual legal precedent) that this case sets.
I can easily imagine a case where, say, X blocks discovery in a similar way to achieve a similar outcome for someone on the left. Do we want this to be how we do things?
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-62416324
Any time someone tells something is “obviously a massive abuse of the justice system”, ask them for details. Many people lie for political reasons knowing that their followers will not check the facts, but those claims usually fall apart as soon as you do. Lying to a judge or doing something you were ordered not to do is going to get you in trouble no matter what else is going on.
In the case of discovery about Google, note that there were two separate problems:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/alex-jones-and-infowars-were...
The first was that he lied about a spreadsheet not existing, and then the defense got evidence that it did - since that behavior was habitual, a judge is going to punish it more harshly than an isolated mistake which is promptly corrected.
The second problem was that he was trying to use the defense that he didn’t profit from Sandy Hook stories while not providing data which could have been used to test that claim. The judge didn’t jail him for that, but he wasn’t allowed to make an unverified “trust me bro” claim.
And true crime podcasts definitely do cause harm, the fans of those shows love playing vigilante detective, stalking and harassing people close to the case to get information. I remember a few years ago there was an incident where they were protesting outside of some guy's house because he was a suspect in his girlfriend's disappearance, so he couldn't even go outside. True crime is an entire industry monetizing tragedies in realtime on a scale the Sandy Hook conspiracies never came anywhere close to.
You basically need to look at the long-term complete picture of how he characterizes his role (I'd suggest https://knowledgefight.com/ as a great source for this) in relation to Sandy Hook.
I cannot recall a specific instance of him apologizing, but I'm convinced he has at one point or another done so. But the number of times he's minimized, ignored, mischaracterized or outright lied about his involvement and impact on the Sandy Hook victims far, far, (FAR) outweighs the actual times he's ever admitted fault and/or apologized.
I am totally fine with convicting those for slander too. It is a pretty disgusting market.
And why should we compare this to the podcast you're describing? They're two completely different kinds of immorality, and are not teams I must pick from.
Boeing killed 346 people
https://apnews.com/article/boeing-guilty-plea-crashes-245a38...
It's negligent and they need to change, but it's pretty forgivable.
Jones went on a mic and ripped false info, enriching no one but himself and grieving these families repeatedly.
But is there any shred of doubt that no one, including the greediest most-souless bureaucrat, actually tried to make an airplane crash and kill people?
Crashing airplanes is VERY predictably bad for the stock price.
This is not taking into account how humans are. People raise their children really badly all the time even though they know what they are doing is bad but they just don't care in the moment. Who wants a bad child? But they still make all the mistakes and end up producing bad children. Incompetence and malice are often nearly identical.
That is not the basis for our system of law. Intention (mens rea) matters greatly. Hence anyone who understands law shouldn't be surprised at comparing outcomes between the boeing case and the jones case.
You can disagree with it, but you really shouldn't be surprised.
Or a man who deliberately runs a person down (but his target survived), and intends to continue doing so?
I'm normally extremely sympathetic to this argument, but not only was this a conspiracy theory about dead children, but it implicated the bereaved, devastated parents and all of the relatives of those children. It's so many people that you can't really make up for it, ever. There's no number of dollars or good deeds that will get him into paradise.
The fact that he still operates in much the same way as before makes me think he's blessed by intelligence agencies to use as pretense for what they want to do or as distraction from what they are doing.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is the Jones/Sandy Hook case-- like the Fox/Dominion case-- was an outlier because there is nearly never that amount of evidence to be able to pass the high bar for defamation.
So I think it's the other way around-- Jones was comically brazen in the claims he made. Hence the huge amounts in the Jones cases. (And if the podcasters are as brazen, go tell the real living people about their open-and-shut defamation cases and collect a nice finders fee for yourself. :)
Edit: clarification
1. No Such Thing As A Fish; 2. My Brother, My Brother And Me; 3. Planet Money; 4. Revolutions; 5. 99% Invisible; 6. Stuff You Should Know; 7. The Adventure Zone; 8. This American Life; 9. Freakinomics Radio; 10. The Rest Is History
I had to scroll to #32 to find Casefile which sorta fits your criteria, except it's hosted by a dude and I think he generally discusses older cases.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/786938/top-podcast-genre...
Can you cite any data on that at all? I’m aware of the genre of podcast you’re referring to but I’ve never been aware of it even remotely being the most popular genre.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/786938/top-podcast-genre...
That says nothing about "women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible" even existing at all. (Although I'm sure there's some examples of it somewhere.)
Unfortunately, slander and fraud are really hard to enforce. In a just system he'd have never earned that money in the first place.
Fortunately, his legal defense was comedically incompetent.
So I'll take "all his money goes to his most-harmed victims" as a compromise.
I fully agree on the guilty verdict, but the sentence, frankly, was meant as a political message for Jones and everyone else on his side of the political spectrum: Stop talking the things you talk, because we are coming for you, and we get you, you won't like it.
As someone who was born in a corrupt small town in a corrupt banana republic, and was somewhat familiar with this kind of thing, it was pretty easy to see it for what it was.
This is also a good time to consider what you are saying by calling it a “political vector”. Lying about a mass shooting snd harassment aren’t traditionally a partisan position so by using that framing you’re implicitly saying they belong to his party.
The second-highest bidder was....an insurance company? Am I misunderstanding?
I am also confused on why it took a whole month for them to reject the sale when it seems to have been accepted for weeks.
A billion dollars is ten billion crowns, that's 10 000 million crowns, or around 5 000 apartments.
I don't understand how 5 000 apartments can be a judgement handed out to an individual over something he says. It doesn't really matter what he says, when it's this kind of huge amounts. One can't fine somebody the value of an entire town unless he's done destruction of that order, or at least a fraction of that order.
It's a level where, when it is an international case, it makes sense for states to get involved with diplomatic pressure. Surely your legal system must be more reasonable than this, because if it's like this, how can it function?
More importantly, you're missing that this was a default judgment - Jones didn't defend himself, so the award is kind of the theoretical maximum. The results aren't comparable to regular court cases where both sides make their case.
A legal system must be robust even to weird or peculiar people who refuse to work with its rules and still produce reasonable results.
I understand that in a system like Russia where dissidents face made-up charges and their attorneys are harassed by the state. But Alex Jones isn’t in that kind of position at all. He has no problem getting legal representation.
The default judgment basically means he admitted guilt by his refusal. That was his choice.
There are always going to be crazy people and a system must be able to deal with them.
This is like a soccer match where one team won by fifty goals, because the other team repeatedly committed fouls and then left the pitch, and you're arguing that the referee should disallow some of the goals because you feel in your gut that fifty is too many.
That procedure or rules have been followed is no reason to accept an absurd outcome. An absurd outcome is rather a reason to reject a set of rules or procedures.
The Knowledge Fight podcast covers this case in its entirety and it's clear that Infowars et al. has toed the line of criminal to delay and deny justice to the victims. The legal system hit the end of the road and said "everything owed to the victims or everything Infowars has" and this is the result.
Compensatory damages is making the claim that the sandy hook families actually suffered $1B in damages.
But 500k per person maybe, if it really heinous?
It's just excessive.
"This content is entertainment and there's no way that any reasonable person could construe this information as facts." If MSNBC, CNN and Fox News can get away with this argument every time they are sued, I don't see how InfoWars doesn't.
But then again, court cases aren't about facts or truth.
The amount of comments opining here without knowing a smidge of the details of the case is sickening.
Also in many cases courts will allow you to walk back from the circumstances that ended up with a person in default and to proceed with a fair trial. I even have direct experience with this in a foreclosure/foreign-judgments case.
The court could have allowed Jones to correct the financial and web-analytics records and proceed, but it didn't.
edit: I dug up the judgement anyways. Take a look and tell me if any of this isn't reasonable. How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21074211-alex-jones-...
> The Court now finds that a default judgment on liability should be granted. The Court finds that Defendants’ discovery conduct in this case has shown flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rules. The Court finds Defendants’ conduct is greatly aggravated by the consistent pattern of discovery abuse throughout the other Sandy Hook cases pending before this Court. Prior to the discovery abuse in this case, Defendants also violated this Court’s discovery orders in Lewis v. Jones, et al. ... and Heslin v. Jones, et al. .... After next violating the October 18, 2019 discovery order in this case, Defendants also failed to timely answer discovery in Pozner v. Jones, et al. ..., another Sandy Hook lawsuit, as well as Fontaine v. InfoWars, LLC, et al. ..., a similar lawsuit involving Defendants’ publications
Perjury is a criminal charge. Contempt is an option to. Judges use the lever of jail time to deal with situations like this all the time (again, direct experience here -- a surrogate court judge put two 70+ year old ladies in Rikers for a month for failing to comply with the court repeatedly over years). Going to default was exceptional behavior that nobody shed a tear for because it's Alex Jones.
Edit: To answer your question > How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?
If you're looking to make a political statement, sure none. If you're looking to have a fair trial, there's still steps A, B and C.
Even the fact that he had to fight all those cases for the same thing separately is a deliberate step to fuck him. Then the court treating giving the same data in each trial as a separate offense is certainly cherry-picking.
I'm not really complaining though because the concept of a fair trial does not exist. Civil or criminal. Do whatever you can not to end up in court. It always boils down to who has the most resources and the appetite for battle. Some pockets (like the state's) are near-infinite.
I have never, ever seen a judge use contempt or a default judgment (against someone represented in court) without directly threatening to use that power first.
The Jones side claims that these discovery requests were for documents that don't exist. The linked judgement provides no detail on what the specific discovery requests were that went unanswered.
Do you know what the discovery requests were for specifically?
But I know that "that document doesn't exist" is a valid response to a discovery request. Silence is not a valid response, even if the document doesn't exist.
(If one side falsely claims the document doesn't exist, the other side then can present evidence to the judge that the document does in fact exist, and that the first side is withholding evidence. If you play that game and get caught, various bad things can happen to you. The judge can look more skeptically at everything you say thereafter, the judge can rule that the other side is entitled to assuming the contents of the document are whatever would be most damaging to your side's case, you or your lawyers can be fined, and your lawyers can be disbarred. Judges deal with this kind of stuff all the time; detecting and blocking such games is a major part of what they do.)
The rest of your post is speculation.
Is that not available somewhere? You'd think it would be presented in detail, since this is the key reason for the default judgement.
I suspect things are more on line these days rather than less, but I haven't tried lately. If nothing else, you should still be able to see everything on PACER. (If they are online instead of in PACER, there may be a delay time - three months, maybe? But for this case, that shouldn't matter.)
For state courts... I don't know.
Institution that is a fundamental part of the establishment and status quo jumps at the chance to shit all over someone who's shtick is undermining public trust in the establishment and status quo. Water is wet. More news at 11.
My sibling in Christ, Jones is paying because he fucked around with courts. He was told to stop by court, and he didn't. He had a chance to defend himself, and he passed on it.
RDDT market cap today is 29.1B.
Alex Jones declared in court that his show reaches about a hundred million people. If that's true then he's paying $10 for every person who heard him defaming the families of dead children.
This would be the same principle as those fines in Nordic countries sometimes that depend on how rich someone is. If you can influence one hundred million people and use that power in a criminally irresponsible way, you get a proportionate fine.
In civil cases our judgements are usually not enormous.
I don't feel that your reasoning above makes the judgement more reasonable. Maybe he does reach that many people, but he obviously makes nowhere near that amount of money and it's out of line with other defamation judgements.
This point made me curious so I quickly looked around. Fox News paid a $787.5 million settlement [1] for making false claims about Dominion. Given that this happened as the trial was about to start, it's reasonable to assume that Fox News expected to lose even more if the issue went to trial. And that's for a party that arguably would have followed court orders, something Alex Jones refused to do.
Next in line is Rudy Giuliani, who was ordered to pay $150 million for defaming two election workers [2]. If Alex Jones defamed 12 families then it comes out roughly the same.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/18/media/fox-dominion-settle...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/rudy-giuliani-def...
Depp v Herd defamation was around $10m.
Sweden isn't the only Nordic country.
Just look up speeding tickets in Finland and Norway.
Definitely how that works.
If I burn down somebody's house and sell tickets to watch, the damages are easy to calculate! It's just my ticket revenue! THE MARKET DECIDED!
Gotta give you some credit though, you beat out some real competition for dumbest take in the thread.
Unfortunately you veer way out of reasonableness when you compare the crime of arson with the civil law of defamation. Criminal law and civil law are very different things... So much so that im not even sure what you're trying to get at with your analogy.
You do seem upset about it though, and that does make sense... I'd imagine the world would be scary without even a basic understanding of the rules that you're held to. Fortunately this information is readily available... Some review material for junior high civics classes will cover most of what you need to know, and should only take you an hour or two to go through.
He was fined over a billion dollars, in what world is losing a billion dollars no consequences?
Also - until he actually pays any of that billion dollars, there have been no consequences.
His lawyer already stated “Finally, a judge followed the law.”.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3280221/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1501065112
https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/
However
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/frogs-rev...
but, > The findings in no way exonerate pollutants like the widely used herbicide atrazine, scientists caution.
Trans frogs, sure, but sex and sexual orientation are different.
> EE2 exposure at all concentrations lowered male sexual arousal, indicated by decreased proportions of advertisement calls and increased proportions of the call type rasping, which characterizes a sexually unaroused state of a male.
So the males also became uninterested in sex with females. Given that I think you must be really nitpicking to find fault with what he said.
I mean...this IS Hacker News. Extreme levels of pedantry is just par for the course, isn't it?
I was always under the impression that the performance art he did with the frogs was in reference to Chlorpyrifos. And I am in concert with Alex Jones here. I agree with him. This crap is not good, is banned throughout the world, and is a mammalian neurotoxin.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1203396109
https://www.salon.com/2020/12/08/chlorpyrifos-neurotoxic-pes...
But you and I both know he crosses the line (and enjoys doing so) from authentic to clown. He'll bedazzle a libertarian and country boy with quirky strange perspectives that have a kernel of truth and then drag them down into the dark ass netherworld he's living his life in. He spins people up and inflames their amygdala's and connects the dots to some dark metaphysical Ba'al. But then he still comes back around and sells you some seeds and some product to stock your nuclear fall out shelter. He's one part performance artist one part grifter. But he crossed a third rail when he tried pulling the parents of a school shooting into his bi-polarish world. Bottom line with a guy like Alex Jones is that he's always going to connect the natural failure-state of a system (FDA regulatory capture) to some fever dream Ba'al conspiracy vs acknowledging that humans and their systems are flawed and that the natural state of a government is one in which it is picking winners and losers (cronyism) and it's been that way in his country since Washington's soldiers and officers mutinied over pensions. https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-source-collect.... That didn't need the illuminati becuase, like the FDA, it's the natural mode of humanity and a system to fail.
Parent’s point is that the amount of the fine doesn’t matter if he is able to avoid paying it. It could have been a quadrillion. A fine only matters if you actually have to pay it.
On an average-person-level, some municipalities nearby me have decided to not basically not do anything about parking fines. As a result, there are vehicles that over ten thousand dollars of fine. But they are still allowed to renew their registration and drive their vehicle. So it’s just a made up demerit.
The structure of the bid was quite complex but essentially the largest debtor agreed to enlarge the share the second largest debtor would receive by supplementing it from their own share due to the awards in the two court cases being so drastically different (basically the largest debtor decided to decrease their own share in that specific bid to supplement the second largest debtor) - this bid was the one that the primary debtor prefers and would award a lot more value to the secondary debtor than the bid that was, on paper, larger.
There are some good detailed analyses of the arrangement out there that would give you a much better understanding than I can communicate second-hand - I'd suggest the overview by LegalEagle[1], personally.
The creditors own the asset. If every dollar the creditors are owed voted, which bid would they choose?
If this is the case, dollars voted are less important than outcome value to the creditors. It is their asset, no? They are assigning value and signaling accordingly.
Sure. I’m trying to approximate a metric that gives their weighted interest. My point is the owners of the asset are selling it, and it seems their interests are obviously maximised by one bid.
The debtor generally deserves their case to be discharged resolved liquidated closed and done forever.
Paying ongoing reparations in royalties or whatever the onion proposes doesn’t accomplish this. Alex Jones himself could convert his case to a chapter 13 and set up a “repayment” plan based on his own anticipated/potential earnings from his own business. It would possibly even be higher, infowars intended audience is probably more profitable than people laughing at infowars on Ben Collins bluesky feed.
The people who got a personal judgment aren’t made whole by a promise of future restitution by someone purchasing his business assets.
What if the onion went bankrupt next year and said oh we’re not going to pay that anymore?
That would be an interesting case to test: a person being relieved from a fraud or criminal tort, as it’s handed off to a third party buying their business, who themselves didn’t commit fraud or a criminal tort and merely became insolvent which is dischargeable.
In the case where the “creditors” own the asset to settle their claim, that’s another story, whether they make $1 or a billion dollars disposing of it is no longer the debtors problem
In the same way that returning my smashed up uninsured car to a secured lender doesn’t make them whole for my discharged loan either.
Sure it does, the Onion would be paying the royalties, Alex Jones already doesn't own it, it's essentially owned by an estate that is selling it off to cover Alex Jones' debts.
The Judge has decided that's unfair, likely due to some bias (intellectual, political, etc.)
FUAC's offer was all cash. The Onion offered less cash, but offered other incentives (AIUI, a share of whatever revenue they make from Infowars in the future). Saying that The Onion's bid was lower requires you to put a dollar value on those other incentives. The fact that the two creditors (read: victims' families) that would benefit from those incentives were willing to sacrifice some of the debt they were owed so they could benefit from those incentives suggests that at least _they_ think those incentives were worth more than the cash upfront, and the amount of debt they were willing to sacrifice gives you an implicit baseline for that dollar value.
Given the site we're on: it's like saying that an offer with a lower base salary but higher equity is automatically a worse offer than a bigger salary with no stock.
That doesn't make sense. A genuine offer for an unprofitable thing could be made. That's not farcical, just a bad investment.
What is that realistically? They said they will turn it into gun safety information. How does a gun safety information site make money out of an audience of people expecting a guy shouting about conspiracy theories?
If this case were an article in The Onion, it'd seem too unrealistic to be funny. Well done, Global Tetrahedron!
So long as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it anyways.
Did the judge argue against the single round or the sealed price?
Criticising sealed bids is nonsense. The gold-standard auction (Vickrey, or more accurately, VCG) features sealed bids. If the judge is criticising sealed bids at all, The Onion should appeal.
Criticising a single-round auction, particularly with two bidders, on the other hand, is valid.
> as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it anyways
Isn't it also meaningless if the person whose estate they're collecting is bidding against them?
VCG is second price, so we're already in a sub-optimal regime with a first-price format. (All while illustrating why Vickrey auctions don't work with unsophisictated observers. Could you imagine the shitshow if The Onion won and then didn't have to pay their bid, but Jones's?)
Given first price, I don't think the number of rounds is revenue equivalent.
> Isn't it also meaningless if the person whose estate they're collecting is bidding against them?
The blatant attempts to move assets out of InfoWars during the bankruptcy is an entirely different story but that money may technically come legally from outside the estate.
Sure. But nobody uses Vickrey because it's impossible to explain to the public why the highest bid wasn't accepted.
> Without the second price you're trying to bid just enough to outbid the other party/parties which won't maximize bid size
Which is exactly what happens in any single-round first-price format. The only thing an open auction does is facilitate collusion. Let me repeat: for a single-round first-price auction, sealed bids are the only way to go.
> that money may technically come legally from outside the estate
It may but it doesn't. Jones saying the judge "ruled in our favour" (emphasis mine) sort of gives away the game.
Google used to use second-price for all their ads, though I think they've stopped: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/10858748
(Which I think, sadly, supports your claim around them being confusing)
This sounds small, but it's a huge difference. Let's I know that some widget is actually extremely valuable, and would be willing to pay up to $1,000. You don't know this, and are willing to pay $80. In a true second-price auction I put in $1000, you put in $80, the bids are unsealed and I pay $80.
But with the e-bay system, if I put in $1,000 at the beginning I've partially tipped my hand by bidding it up to $80. You started with some uncertainty about the value of the object, but knowing that I agree it's worth at least $80 pushes you in the direction of thinking it's worth more. This is a major advantage of sniping: by putting your bid in only at the last minute you keep others from reacting to your bid by changing theirs, and so convert the auction into something much closer to a true second-price auction.
There's also some assumptions built into these analyses that there's at least two people who have a reasonable perception of the value of an item. Things get massively more difficult to analyze when you start including changes in perceived value.
The point is, in the above example, you wouldn't bid $1,000. So I will bid $50. Then $60. Then $70. Then $80. Then $90. And then, seeing the price has changed, I will stop. And wait. I am willing to pay $1,000. But it doesn't ever make sense for me to bid that.
That's the beauty of the eBay system it works for people to interact in two ways, as a more boring sealed second bid system and as a live cry auction. The biggest point it falls apart is you need a certain number of people to understand the system to act rationally about it. If you only have people treat it like a live cry auction then it defaults to acting like one.
Yes. It's why people use bots, e.g. [1].
For low-value products, particularly amidst repeat auctions, the incentive to do so is small enough that one can mostly ignore it. For a high-stakes auction, you're just devolving the game into a high-frequency race.
> If you only have people treat it like a live cry auction then it defaults to acting like one
The point is it really only works as an English auction. The "sealed" bid is for convenience. (It's not really a sealed or even semi-sealed bid, it's just a dumb auto-bidding bot.) Run a major auction with this format and you'd have zero activity until the millisecond before bids were due followed by a mountain of lawsuits.
> this format and you'd have zero activity until the millisecond before bids were due followed by a mountain of lawsuits.
Sure but no one does, the eBay model is a compromise to make the bidding structure more familiar to people who don't understand the second price mechanism. Major auctions don't need to make that accommodation, the audience can be relied on to read and think about the auction structure which is unfortunately not an option you can really take for a mass market tool.
Of course you can. You repeatedly enter marginally-higher bids until you crest their limit. The only case where the auction is efficient is if the automatic bidder is the highest and someone else bids up to their maximum.
> can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is
Correct. But eBay doesn't have sealed bids. You can absolutely snipe an auto-bidder; this is like the first high-speed algorithm that was ever developed in the real markets.
> no one does
Literally pointed you to an eBay bidding bot.
> the eBay model is a compromise to make the bidding structure more familiar to people who don't understand the second price mechanism
...yes. The eBay model is a compromise that works for unsophisticated bidders and low-value auctions. eBay's model is a known-flawed model that does not "discover the best price an item can be sold for in a reasonably constrained time" [1].
That's not sniping. Inherent to last second sniping is you get a limited amount of chances to boost your bids, in the best case you're taking one shot at the bid to place it at the last millisecond eBay will accept your bid. You're trying to get the last bid in on an auction so no one has a chance to respond. Incrementally bidding up to find the ceiling is directly opposed to the goal of having a sniping bot.
> Literally pointed you to an eBay bidding bot.
That was talking about other auction runners using the eBay model for extremely high value items because of the complexity of execution, not about people using bots. I know people use bots it's just that to win they have to beat the bid placed by people using the second price functionality. I'm not denying their existence just questioning how effectively they actually distort the auction structure.
If a lot of different people (using different bots to avoid GIXEN's automatic mini auction) all place their maximum bids at the last second the winner is still the person with the max bid be that a bot user or a pre bidder.
The winning strategy to win that bidding war is still to place your maximum bid in the bot and if everyone does that it's just a normal sealed second price auction. The bot strategy just relies on there not being enough interest in every item and finding one where you can bid less than your maximum and still win which is also true of a pure sealed second price auction. I'm just not seeing where the strategy and outcome differ by including bots if there are second price bidders in the mix bidding their true max.
The reason people don't do this on eBay is because sellers can have a friend bid on the item to raise the second-place bid more than you're willing to pay (shill bidding). The Nash equilibrium for second price auctions is to only bid the maximum you're willing to pay. Bidding a higher amount leaves you vulnerable to these shill bidding tactics.
Of course... why would you ever bid more than you're willing to pay? Huge doesn't mean more than your maximum.
Also those shill bids are also betting on being able to perfectly find the point where they are juuuust below your max bid without knowing the actual max bids on the item at any given moment. If they fail they can not pay out but the seller is out their time and any listing fees (depending on the eBay era we're talking about). Conceivably you're still willing to pay your maximum bid the second time an item is available in most circumstances.
Even shill bidding aligns with the goal of auctions to find the maximum price for an item. The goal of the auction is to benefit the seller not the buyer's ability to get a deal. It would probably be fixable by making the bid more binding but that's a separate issue you're still paying at max your nominal maximum price if you win.
Yes. That or you use one shill to uncloak the max and then another to bid just below it. Worst case, as you said, you're only out your listing fee.
> shill bidding aligns with the goal of auctions to find the maximum price for an item
Which is why for high-value items in a system subject to shill bids, bona fide bidders don't put their actual maximum price into an unsealed (or semi-sealed) system. Which lowers the auction price.
Klemperer wrote an approachable intro to auction theory.
The VCG auction is only good in theory. In practice, most people don't know how much they actually value a thing, and when they are trying to play the VCG game they typically underbid and later have deep remorse. That's the most common mistake, but I've seen plenty of other mistakes as well.
In other words, VCG auctions tend not to work well because the bidders often don't have a strong enough grasp over game theory nor a deep enough understanding of how valuable an asset is to them, and therefore the VCG usually generates suboptimal outcomes.
In my experience, the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go. Instead, you have to talk yourself into taking a risk on being left holding the bag if you choose to push the price up.
May I hazard a guess that you worked on low-value recurring auctions? You're describing unsophisticated bidders unwilling to expend search costs. For them, yes, "the seller has an interest in providing participants with as much information as possible about the object’s value" both before bidding starts and during it, the latter due to the impact to bids being less than the overcoming of search costs.
> the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go
Another comment highlights why this doesn't work for high-value items [2]. (They also assume bona fide bids, which isn't a problem if you can filter out shill bids.)
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2020/pop...
It varies. In all cases, the value was below $20,000, in many cases the auction was non-recurring and >$1,000 (for example, specific web domains). I've seen enough smart people fumble a $1,000+ VCG auction that I'd be nervous to assume bidding would be any better at $100 million. I've also seen enough investors fumble $10m+ investment deals (not auctions though) to feel comfortable asserting that a higher value auction does not necessarily imply that the participants will be better at auction theory.
So it sounds like the judge specifically had issues with the use of sealed bids.
As opposed to selling the building for $1 million cash and everyone getting 2% of what they are owed.
The creditors already own the asset. The estate is selling, not Alex Jones.
If you asked every creditor which bid they preferred, which do you think they'd choose? The creditors forgoing their claims obviously prefer one. As for the rest, they'll choose the one that pays them more: The Onion's bid.
This isn't how bankruptcy works in practice, but it's a good shorthand for what the correct answer should be.
The parent comment, quoted above is misinformation.
What?
The whole point of bankruptcy is that the creditors do not get to vote and the solution that makes the majority happy isn't the best one. In an ideal bankruptcy everyone recovers the same percentage of their debt.
Federal Bankruptcy Law provides the procedural framework.
So, Delaware law does in fact have nearly everything to do with it.
Federal bankruptcy law sets the substantive as well as procedural rules for bankruptcy, and its substantive provisions trump any state law, but, OTOH, state law has some role both in determining what the set of claims going in to bankruptcy are and, to the extent permitted in federal bankruptcy law, setting things like allowable personal exemptions, etc.
How would the corporate charter affect the fairness of how the auction was conducted?
So potentially has massive implications for the auction and its fairness.
What does Delaware have to do with it? If DE had any jurisdiction, what law would have been broken?
https://www.dailydac.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/0859-Win...
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...
Wrong. Vickrey auctions are well studied in single-item auctions even with two bidders [1]. (They perform between 4/3 and 2 compared to an optimal omniscient auction. Not solved. But not unstudied.)
> claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business
This is Chapter 7. The bankruptcy estate already legally owns the asset, not Jones.
[1] https://www.timroughgarden.org/papers/bk.pdf Examples 4.6 and 5.2
Call it 52,000 from the onion sale.
well now someone says I could have bought it for 10 million.
trustee now gets $300,000. They’re not going to get in the way.
No, it really isn’t. Not with two bidders. The moment the first party announces their bid you have perfect collusion (if the second party, rationally, runs out the clock) or a stalled auction (if running out the clock is impossible, thereby always allowing someone to always claim they’ll bid better).
Blind bidding doesn't let people improve their bid, but it also lets someone bid much higher than the second best bid, so it can be extremely profitable in some situations. Compare to a version of said auction where you bid only once, but where the winner will only pay the second best bid plus one.
Imagine game theory dynamics in poker if an unhappy player could say "well, come to think of it, I guess I did not really want to see, I'd rather fold"
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.
So it is more of a question to the bankruptcy court itself, as I would agree that there's no value in Infowars without Jones. So my opening bid to the court is $1.
He paid $44B. He probably could have got it for less at the time, but if you think it's not worth that, I'm not sure what to tell you. It's literally where all news gets broken. All of it. And he's using it to influence global politics.
Not everyone thinks this. Are you talking about the financial geniuses in the comments?
>To the point, he was forced by a court to honor his original higher price than what he wanted to pay after re-evaluating it.
What's your point? The original comment was to imply "Haha! Elon overpaid for Twitter!". The company is worth more than $44B. Not sure why you're quibbling about being able to buy at the absolute rock bottom price, even when he got and will continue to get value from the purchase.
It's indisputable that Twitter was worth $44B at the time of the sale because by definition the price of something is what the buyer and seller agree to perform the transaction.
What's also indisputable is that even Elon Musk was refusing to pay that much for Twitter and tried to back down until he was sued to force him to put his money where his mouth was.
I know you think this is some kind of deep philosophical insight, but there's an entire industry built around getting value from an asset beyond the price paid. We don't live in a world of perfect information.
What evidence are you basing this on?
That $5.25m debt forgiveness would have to be valued at $1.75m or more for the winning bid to actually be higher, but if other creditors are assuming that they will have losses of higher than 66% then the $3.5m all-cash bid would actually be better for other creditors.
That seems a very foreseeable outcome.
I mean, I’m not advocating it, but we saw the decision of a guy who made the news over the past week with a healthcare exec.
This is basically going to be the United States for the immediate future, if you're connected to the right people.
Downvote all you want, but we see it with our own eyes.
Comparing one guy who was in the hot seat only because of his surname to the incoming shit storm is risible.
And some of these incoming people threatened to keep going after him just to inflict pain on his father.
These are no longer the party of Romney and McCain. "The cruelty is the point".
They rejected it because it was worded to absolve him of all crimes, not just those charged, and the judge found the parties did not agree on which interpretation was correct so there was no agreement. It is completely appropriate for the court to want to know exactly what the plea agreement covers and to make sure both sides actually agree on the meaning of it. They could have ended it by coming up with a simple, normal plea agreement that doesn't have that strange ambiguity.
If anything, that looks more like an attempt to do a backdoor non-pardon pardon than some kind of persecution. It was only "dragged out" because Biden's DoJ did not agree in court with Hunter Biden's lawyers on what they had actually agreed to.
And despite the "they" in your sentence seeming to refer to Republicans in some capacity, from start to finish, the Hunter Biden prosecution was done by Joe Biden's Department of Justice. You may complain that the judge was appointed by Trump, but the charges couldn't have been brought to begin with without Biden's DoJ authorizing it.
There exists boatloads of concrete evidence Hunter Biden was guilty of several categories of crimes, related to drugs, corruption, illegal firearms and child prostitutes.
There’s a reason he had to be pardoned by Joe, right? He essentially created a “the full laptop” pardon, complete unprecedented.
Any other person guilty of half these things would be in for life.
You got it backwards. He didn’t get a shit storm due to his last name. He got a free pass due to it.
If Harris had won, Biden would not have pardoned Hunter. Likely Harris would've pardoned him in a year or two after he'd seen prison.
Exactly. The lawfare must stop.
Surely there must be a legally viable way to resolve such a bankruptcy that doesn't involve the assailant buying back the gun with funds raised from friends.
[1] https://www.mass.gov/news/supreme-judicial-court-chief-justi...
The court knows it can’t sell it back to Jones or a proxy of, but this decision also allows Jones to continue as if he hadn’t sold. And I think that’s what they’re aiming for
BTW, this is a lot more than pharmaceutical companies pay out for actually killing people.
I remember watching the trial and it was the most ridiculous thing every. The defendant (Alex) wasn't allowed to say he's innocent because the judge defaulted him. Yet the prosecution was allowed to bring in all kinds of evidence of his guilt (other than him being defaulted) and present that to the jury.
So in essence, you're guilty because the judge said so, and the prosecution gets to pile on about your guilt, but you can't testify to the jury counter your guilt. Yet somehow this a jury trial.
The other ridiculous thing was he was defaulted for namely not showing Youtube ad revenue for his shows, after youtube deleted his channel.
They also awarded an FBI agent, I guess for hurt feelings, not even related to the families.
1.5 Billion .... apparently not a political prosecution of a critic, designed to silence him by taking InfoWars off air.
You know when Alex offered $55 million to settle. The lawyers somehow decided to get less by pushing for the bankruptcy.
Of course the judge allowed that mistake to be used in trial.
So I think he did show up as least from that memory of the trial.
And about the phone there are avenues to block the use of evidence accidentally sent to the opposition but Jones's lawyers failed to raise those when the plaintiff's lawyer pointed out the phone copy was included in the documents sent to them. They had the chance to get it excluded but failed to so it was allowed, it wasn't the judge allowing something unusual it was Jones and his lawyers being a complete disaster in the case.
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 how horrible you are.
Jones lied and continues to lie to this day about why he lost the case because it's a liar and a con man and the claim he's persecuted unfairly helps him sell his supplements to his audience.
You make the assumption that it's practically possible to prove a negative like that. For example, prove that unicorns don't exist ... maybe you just haven't looked long and hard enough.
> Jones lied and continues to lie to this day about why he lost the case because > it's a liar and a con man and the claim he's persecuted unfairly helps him > sell his supplements to his audience.
If all that Alex did was lie, I don't think anyone would care about him.
Clearly he's been on the political radar because his "conspiracy theories" too often turned out to be true..
I don't think you're being very charitable to his audience.
People enjoy listening to a counter negative to the mainstream narrative. And some people find great value in it, enough to support him by buying his supplements.
Alex speaks in hyperbolic ways, people can make whatever they want of that. If he calls P. Diddy a deep state demon, for example. Is that a lie? Demons don't exist. Sure. But can humans approach demon like behaviour. I think so.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DMbGhAU77ns?feature=share
1. The phone records are from the last 2 years. So not during the time frame of the actual broadcasts about Sandy Hook happened ( which happened way earlier...)
2. He gave the phone records to his lawyer, which goes against claims of him not co-operating. His lawyers would determine which messages get sent over to the prosecution. For example, private communications with his legal team would be protected and would not need to be disclosed.
The defence sent over the entire phone backup, by mistake. Why is this a gotcha you think it is?
The prosecution also acted unethically by not informing the defence that they received protected communications, they weren't entitled to.
The prosecution let the trial happen for 2 weeks, and had not informed the judge that they actually had the information, that they used to get the judge to default him for not cooperating!
So how is this not actually grounds to throw the case out? Seems like misconduct.
Also, just because he mentioned Sandy Hook in a text message with his lawyers, or privately, doesn't mean the prosecution is automatically entitled to it.
This is a flat-out lie.
https://www.nextpoint.com/ediscovery-blog/alex-jones-ediscov...
"For example, why didn’t Mr. Jones’ attorney take advantage of the 'snap-back' provision in the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure (Rule 193.3) and assert a privilege on the text messages within the 10-day prescribed period? We know from court filings that Plaintiff’s counsel (Mark Bankston) sent an email to Mr. Jones’ attorney (Federico Reynal) shortly before midnight on July 22, 2022 stating, 'My assumption is now that you did not intend to send us this? Let me know if I am correct.'"
"All Mr. Reynal had to do was 'identify the material or information produced and state the privilege asserted,' and Mr. Bankston would be required to 'promptly return the specified material or information' and would be prohibited from using it in court."
(Of note: Jones' attorney faced, but dodged sanctions over this. https://www.law.com/ctlawtribune/2023/01/20/alex-jones-texas...)
> Also, just because he mentioned Sandy Hook in a text message with his lawyers, or privately, doesn't mean the prosecution is automatically entitled to it.
Your own clip shows he lied under oath, stating he personally searched the phone for "Sandy Hook" and got zero results.
Full motion: https://craigball.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/585543969-f...
"My assumption is now that you did not intend to send us this? Let me know if I am correct.” Id.
In response thereto, Reynal instructed Bankston that “there appears to have been a mistake in the file transfer. […] Disregard the link and I will work on resending. Id."
Still doesn't excuse the prosecution from not informing the judge in a prompt manner, that they had received the information, who's lack of they used to get a default judgment. They let an entire trial happen, and still did not inform the judge that they had received the information. Prosecution only did so after the defence filled this motion.
>>Your own clip shows he lied under oath, stating he personally searched the
>> phone for "Sandy Hook" and got zero results.
It's possible he lied, but there's other explanations.
1. We don't actually know what kind of phone he was using, and its search capabilities. You're assuming it was the latest apple or Samsung. But it could have been a very basic phone, with limited search capability.
2. The phone in question, was not the one he searched. As Alex was likely using multiple phones (quite possible) over a span of 2 years. Gave the old one to his lawyer to backup, and searched his new phone. People lose or brake or upgrades phones all the time. The backup may not always restore everything. So it's possible there's a difference between what was given to the lawyer and the phone he searched, without any malice.
3. It's possible he searched for Sandy Hook, and still had no results for technical reasons. Eg. Gave the phone to the defence to backup. The backup copied the phone's data to a computer, but also erased the phone.
A really entertaining podcast has actually done a series of episodes on the depositions in the case. If you are curious about the facts heres a list of those episodes:
https://knowledgefight.libsyn.com/size/25/?search=Formulaic+...
Be warned they are...long and detailed.
Given how aggressive the partisan media is, you'd think they would have an established set of incriminating soundbites. When I did look into it deeper, I found that the case was decided by a default decision. Maybe there are reasons for these legal technicalities. I can appreciate that.
If the standard for the discussion is, "AJ was found guilty in court", then we should be clear that this doesn't mean he was found guilty in the substance of the case. Posters here should consider that before going off the deep end in demonizing AJ. HN is a site where discussions routinely involve citing sources. Yet, this part is assumed.
An unprecedented 1.5B in judgement, some of which goes to an FBI agent who worked on the case? Specifically on that point, there are compelling reasons why libel laws apply differently or not at all to government officials. Mainly this revolves around the threat of censoring regime critics. See also: lese-majesty.
Then we find that the plaintiffs' lawyers are explicitly a political group, "The Everytown Group For Gun Control", funded by Michael Bloomberg. Lawyers have claimed that they don't actually want to collect the damages for their client, rather that they have an ulterior motive in shutting down InfoWars. It isn't unreasonable to view this as a war of political factions.
The drama is on-going, but now it is viewed within the context of partisan lawfare against a former and now elected president.
None of these observations are inexplicable, but taken all-together, they fail the smell test for this poster.
I suspect he may end up buying the assets himself or someone in this circle.
InfoWars is worth nothing if not for Alex Jones right. So if you want to maximize value, you need to somehow keep him around to serve his audience.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/10/business/media/the-onion-...
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/davidsacerdote.bsky.social/feed/aaa...
Disclaimer, I think Trump is a buffoon, but I also think this kind of thinking is backwards.
Infowars has a large following and has been very supportive of Trump while being critical of Biden. The rationale for the motivation to act politically in both directions is certainly there.
There’s no double jeopardy in a civil case - it’s a matter of if someone has a claim of damages.
Hmm.
A useless distinction in practice.
It's like bidding on a foreclosed house with $0 but beating everybody because you say you're going to rent it and pay back the bank with that money.
The trustee was explicitly granted wide latitude in how to handle the auction, including canceling it outright. [0]