Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones speaks to the media after arriving at the federal courthouse for a hearing in front of a bankruptcy judge Friday, June 14, 2024, in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
The Onion has won the bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars from embattled conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been repeatedly skewered by the well-known satirical news outlet.
Jones on Thursday morning announced that Infowars was being shut down and promised to file legal challenges over the manner of the sale.
“I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the U.S. trustee over our bankruptcy this morning and they said they are shutting us down even without a court order this morning,” Jones said in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter. “The Connecticut Democrats with The Onion newspaper bought us.”
According to Jones, when he inquired as to whether The Onion was the highest bidder for his former company, he claimed he was told, “Well, it was competitive.”
“They changed all the bidding rules — made it secret two days ago. I had a bad feeling. I told you that. And just like they tried to shut us down back in late May, without a court order, we’re supposed to have a court order. There’s going to be injunctions filed.”
Jones was required to liquidate his business assets — and a great deal of personal assets — to help him pay out the $1.4 billion judgment levied against him for his repeated defamatory statements about the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, including his false claim that the tragedy was a “giant hoax.”
The Onion’s bid was backed by several families of the victims of the mass shooting, CEO Ben Collins wrote on X. They did so by agreeing to “forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of The Onion’s bid, enabling its success,” according to a statement the families attorney, Chris Mattei, provided to CNN.
“After surviving unimaginable loss with courage and integrity, they rejected Jones’ hollow offers for allegedly more money if they would only let him stay on the air because doing so would have put other families in harm’s way,” Mattei said.
Specifics about the winning bid were not immediately available, but the price included Infowars and its production studio as well as its dietary supplement business.
“As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately,” Bryce P. Tetraeder, CEO of the Onion’s parent company Global Tetrahedron wrote in a fittingly tongue-in-cheek statement. “Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar-sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.”
A person with knowledge of the sale reportedly told NBC News that The Onion plans to reintroduce the Infowars site as a parody of itself featuring content from “well-known internet humor writers.”
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