From what the internet says, it didn’t go to the highest bidder.
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.
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?
That doesn't make sense. A genuine offer for an unprofitable thing could be made. That's not farcical, just a bad investment.
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.)