Am I missing something or does this NYT article not actually say what the judge based his decision on? That would be an important piece of information to have when deciding whether the decision was good or not.
> 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).
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.
> 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)