Bankruptcy judge rejects The Onion's bid to buy Alex Jones' Infowars
www.nbcnews.com
The ruling dashed, at least for now, the plans of The Onion’s parent company to take over Infowars and radically shift its content.
  • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 month ago

    Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez is from Texas and first got an MA in Theology before going into law – if that gives you any useful context.

  • JaggedRobotPubes@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    1 month ago

    The good timeline peeked into this one for a second there. Can’t have that threat to Traditional Family Values Brand ™️ dystopia

    • Notyou@sopuli.xyz
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      1 month ago

      It is on all of us to make a good timeline. A chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link.

        • bbbbbbbbbbb@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          No, they had a lesser bid with the Sandy Hook victims taking lesser settlements to push up the value of TheOnions bid

            • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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              1 month ago

              That’s not the issue - the losing company wasn’t given an opportunity to counter bid

              Ftfa

              The judge said Murray had acted in good faith in running the auction in which The Onion’s parent company initially appeared to prevail, but he said the trustee did not run a transparent process and should have given a rival bidder associated with Jones another chance to improve its bid.

            • homura1650@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              It depends on how you count. Jones is unlikely to ever pay the full value of his debts, so the value of the victims forgoing their portion should be discounted proportionally.

              I would comment on how the calculation was actually done, but federal courts do not allow for public recordings, and this court does not appear to make it’s written orders public either.

      • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        1 month ago

        That wasn’t the issue here. The issue here was inconsistency in the way the trustee handled the auction. An auction the trustee was given complete control over how to run by the court.

        Even though there were no complaints at the time of the auction, from either party when the process was explained and processed. Only after the auction was over did the losing party (Jones’ puppet bidder) complain about it.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    1 month ago

    A rival bidder associated with Jones, First United American Cos., offered $3.5 million in cash, or twice as much cash as The Onion’s parent company. First United American is a limited liability company affiliated with Jones’ dietary supplements business, and its bid had Jones’ blessing.

    How the fuck can that company possibly win a bid when it ought to be getting auctioned off to pay the Sandy Hook families too‽

        • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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          1 month ago

          How the fuck can that company possibly win a bid when it ought to be getting auctioned off to pay the Sandy Hook families too‽

          They’re not the company being auctioned. I honestly don’t know how to make that simpler…

          • Bronzebeard@lemm.eeEnglish
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            1 month ago

            They didn’t say it was. But his companies are being auctioned of because he didn’t have enough money to pay the fine. But if one of his other companies is buying those company of his… There’s some shenanigans going on.

            • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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              1 month ago

              Okay? The court is ordering the bankrupt companies to be auctioned to pay for legal settlements. The other company is not part of that deal. So it can do what it wants. If you’re still confused then I can’t help you. But I’d start by realizing the judges involved probably know a lot more about the process than you do.

            • FlowVoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
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              1 month ago

              This is the first step to failing twice.

              FUAC might get another chance to bid, but so will the Onion. And the Onion will outbid FUAC, because they have up to $965 million available if necessary.

              • GiuseppeAndTheYeti@midwest.socialEnglish
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                1 month ago

                The Onion is buying it to kill it. They won’t want to recklessly spend a good chunk of their valued worth just to cut off the head of a hydra. Even if it’s better for the family’s true intentions of silencing Jones.

                • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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                  1 month ago

                  The Sandy Hook families have agreed to reduce the amount they are owed in the settlement in order to make up the difference between The Onion and the highest bidder. This allows other creditors to end up getting paid more despite The Onion’s bid being less because the families are taking less of a cut.

                  So it’s not The Onion paying more money, it’s the families taking less, and the families aren’t doing this for the money.

                • FlowVoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
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                  1 month ago

                  Nobody wants to spend much money on it. That’s why the Onion will win the auction, they can use $965 million of Alex Jones’s own debt, courtesy the Sandy Hook families, to pay for it.

          • ZMonster@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Honestly this is straight out of the Infowars playbook. AJ has been fleecing racist morons with his pals for decades.

            • FlowVoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
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              1 month ago

              The Sandy Hook plaintiffs are owed $975 million. They are supporting the Onion’s bid by pledging as much of that as necessary to beat the opposing bid (remember, they have rights to most of the auction proceeds).

              An analogy: you put something on eBay, and then decide you want to keep the item for yourself. You can easily outbid anyone else, because in the end you are (mostly) paying yourself. The only question is how much eBay’s tiny cut will be.

              Well, Sandy Hook plaintiffs are basically putting Infowars on eBay but determined to win the auction. The winner of the auction is a foregone conclusion, so the only question is what small cut some other folks are going to get.

                • FlowVoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
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                  1 month ago

                  Because there remains an unanswered question: what small cut some other folks are going to get.

                  The only way to answer that is with an auction. Just like in the above analogy, the only way to determine your eBay fees is to actually have an eBay auction.

                  And they did have an auction, but the presiding judge didn’t like the auction rules. They can change the rules and thus change the cut, but the winners won’t change.

      • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        1 month ago

        Yeah, I really buy that. About as much as him saying he had nothing to do with AEJ holdings, or had no stake in the companies that his parents owned with him.

        If he’s not got a direct financial stake in this, he’s got an under the table one. No one affiliated with Jones should be able to buy InfoWars.

  • BrundleFly2077@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    I think evil has always had the upper hand in history, in some way or another. We didn’t get to this point on the backs of our best people.

    What makes this new era so weird is that the bad guys have won so hard that it’s begun to trickle down to the stupidest, least creative, most inept evils in our society. They used to be the fodder we chewed through as a society to distract from the worse stuff higher up the chain.

    Evil used to be clever.

    • DashboTreeFrog@discuss.onlineEnglish
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      1 month ago

      Been wandering if greed/power is actually the Great Filter of the Fermi paradox looking at the world we live in. The “evils” just keep getting worse…

        • m4m4m4m4@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          But most of its “brutal-ness” of contemporary life is not about natural disasters, diseases or circumstances that go way beyond our reach.

          It’s because us humanity. We (stilñ) are brutal and cruel and unforgiving and relentless.

          And we have the courage of calling ourselves “civilization”.

        • Shareni@programming.dev
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          1 month ago

          Wait for the environmental changes and the mass extinction event to break your knees because you’re overdue on your vig

          • SmoothOperator@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            I’m not saying the “evils” won’t get worse in the future, just saying that for a long time they’ve actually been lessened dramatically.

            We can acknowledge that things have been getting better for a long time, and work to keep that going for the future, without diminishing or downplaying the serious issues we face today.

            • orclev@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              Things haven’t been getting better, we’ve just gotten a lot better at deferring the negative consequences of our actions. In many cases entire generations can go by now without having to suffer the consequences of their actions, but those consequences are still coming.

              • SmoothOperator@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                As mentioned elsewhere, global child and infant mortality has gone from around 50% to around 5%. That counts as an example of something getting a lot better in my book.

                But fair if that’s not what you mean. What would better look like for you?

                • orclev@lemmy.world
                  0·
                  1 month ago

                  Massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and pollution in general, massive reduction in both poverty and homelessness (ideally homelessness would be eliminated, there’s literally nothing stopping that from happening), access to healthcare as a fundamental human right, and massive reduction in wealth inequality would be a good start. On top of that we need better democracies (nothing has fundamentally improved on that front in hundreds of years), and equal protection of rights and access to justice for everyone, not just for the rich, those with the “right” color of skin and who happen to believe in the “right” delusion.

                  The EU has done a bit for a lot of these points in theory but the execution in many cases has been sloppy, haphazard, and generally ineffective. The rest of the world is looking a lot worse and in many cases is actively regressing. While individual countries at various points in time have seen improvements in individual areas in many cases those improvements were short lived as the various elements of humanity that oppose progress for selfish reasons chip away at and eventually destroy these small gains.

                  Our science, technology, and medical knowledge do constantly improve, but when all of that is then used for warfare and squeezing profit out of the suffering and misfortune of others the net effect is negative.

                  It seems like it’s almost a law of nature that for every gain and improvement humanity makes in one area, we must have an equal negative impact in another.

        • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
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          1 month ago

          You say that as someone rich enough to be posting on Lemmy and therefore probably part of the global 1%, or close to it. Remember that the worldwide median household income is still only around $3,000/year.

  • taiyang@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Imma be honest, between this and the CEO killing we’ve only really had two pieces of good news all fucking year and the same dipshits ruining everything are ruining this too. This plus being nonstop sick since August with several colds is really making 2024 the shittiest year (so far).

    Can someone at least give us a piece of good news before the end of the year? Maybe something that tops both?

    • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 month ago

      Unions are getting completely overwhelmed with the number of active organizing efforts going on in the country.

    • neomachino@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      1 month ago

      Not your main point but for the past few years I’ve spent half of the months sick. I got a cold 3 weeks ago, everyone else in the house is better, my throat is still halfway swollen shut, my nose is a broken faucet, my heads still filled with helium. I’ll start feeling better just in time for the Christmas party where I’m almost certain to get sick again.

      I went to a doctor to see if there was something wrong with me and got a bunch of test done, got a nice ~$800 bill and haven’t been able to get in touch with the doctor since. I missed 2 calls from them about a week after my tests and since has been calling in a couple times a month to find out if there’s something up but I keep getting “the doctor will call you back later”.

      I would like to assume the fact that no one is calling me back means I’m don’t have anything seriously wrong, but I still would like to know for certain.

      • taiyang@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 month ago

        Yeah that’s my fear of what will happen if I get a bunch of tests done. This cough is awful but nothing mysterious, I just think my kids are just getting me sick repeatedly but only showing mostly minimal signs (except pneumonia my daughter had that we did successfully got treated since our pediatrics are OK).

        But I can’t ever know for certain because it’s just expensive and inconvenient to check, and at the end of the day it’s likely “oh, looks like you had RSV followed by COVID followed by the Flu, each a week before their respective vaccines were available this year and within days of each other. Womp womp.”

      • Sabata@ani.social
        0·
        1 month ago

        They will just promote the claims denial Ai or a human that can out-perform it.