And its new owner, Global Tetrahedron founder Jeff Lawson and Onion CEO Ben Collins have more integrity and balls than Jeff Bezos:
Stranger
Heh. Was just about to post this.
There is a very interesting, amusing, insightful, and mostly insane portrayal of Alex Jones, before he got very famous or infamous, in Jon Ronson’s hilarious and prophetic book Them!, which I very highly recommend.
Not that either bar was particularly challenging to exceed…
And I, for one, welcome our new Allium overlords.
I’m sure Inofwar readers won’t notice a thing.
from article -
Not to disagree with @Stranger_On_A_Train’s statement, or @Sherrerd’s perfect counter that it was a low bar, but, IMHO, it’s -ALSO- about lack of consequences. I mean The Onion is already on Trump’s shitlist, if he can keep it in his addled mind long enough. Bezos and the other bozos are terrified that their other businesses are going to get gutted by Trump, because after all, in the modern market, papers are small potatoes when it comes to wealth or income.
So Bezos and the Washington Post are all about CYA and cowardice, and The Onion once again grins and says “Come at me bro!” I consider them Shakespearean “wise fools” and wish them luck. But I suspect that like that class, they’re in for a lot of tragedy.
Amen!
Unfortunately:
A bankruptcy judge on Tuesday rejected a bid by The Onion’s parent company to buy Alex Jones’ far-right media empire, including the website Infowars, ruling that the auction process was unfair.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said after a two-day hearing that The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, had not submitted the best bid and was wrongly named the winner of an auction last month by a court-appointed trustee.
“I don’t think it’s enough money,” Lopez said in a late-night ruling from the bench in a Houston court. “I’m going to not approve the sale.”
Does this mean using sealed bids is no longer kosher? The Onion has won here regardless of the outcome.
The issue is that the bad guys bid $3.5 million while the good guys bid 1.75 million plus an agreement from the Connecticut Sandyhook plaintifs (who were owed a $billion that they know they will never see) to effectively donate back $5.25 million of what they got from the sale, just to make sure that the bad guys didn’t get it effectively bumping up their bid to $7million.
This was a curve ball that the bad guys didn’t see coming, and their bid of $3.5M was based on the assumption that they just had to worry about outbidding the Onion. So they cried that the $5.25 million wasn’t actual real money and so shouldn’t count. The judge seemed to say two things, first off that the bad guys should have been told that this sort of thing was in the works, so that the they could alter their strategy accordingly, and second that $3.5 million was too low for the assets. So they are going to try again.
The solution it seems to me is to find a sugar daddy who can put $5.25 million (or maybe a bit more just to be safe) down on the table for the bid, and then have the families sign an contract with them agreeing to pay them back the money they spent after the families get their proceeds from the sale. Now there is a larger bid down on the table in cash, and what happens behind the scenes is irrelevant third party agreements.
It doesn’t really matter. The trustee had plenary authority to conduct the auction has he saw fit within the confines of the bankruptcy judge’s instructions in order to achieve the best outcome for claimants, which he did by getting the Sandy Hook families to agree to relinquish their claims (which constitute the vast proportion of claims on the residual property, thus returning far more money to other creditors), and was not in any way required to be “transparent” about the bids or run additional rounds of competitive bidding. The judge didn’t like the result because, quite frankly, he’s a Trump appointee with significant bias, and decided to not permit the accepted bid to process through his court.
Even if Global Tetrahedron can pony up more money he’ll just find some other rationalization to negate the deal until it goes to the front company that wants to reopen InfoWars and pay Alex Jones to continue to spread misinformation. Given that the judgement given to the families was clearly intended to be punitive (far more than InfoWars and Jones are worth) and put the operation out of business, that scheme is doing an end run around the original judgement for the families. Get used to this kind of legal fuckery because this is what the next four years, and likely decades of Trump-appointed ‘conservative’ federal judges, of judgements are going to look like.
Stranger
If he was totally in Jones pocket then he could have just declared the Sandyhook contribution invalid and ruled that since $3.5M was greater than $1.75M, Jone’s shell company had the higher bid and should win. Or at the very least that a new trustee who was more sympathetic to Jones should be appointed.
The appointed trustee ran the auction, and given the value that the agreement Global Tetrahedron had with the families it offered a real financial advantage in actual payment to the other creditors that cannot be ignored. Judge Lopez can reject the auction under manufactured pretenses (even though it was completely in accordance with the judge’s instructions) but to step in and arbitrarily declare a different winner would be too obviously (and literally) prejudicial.
The shell company bidder isn’t owned by Jones (who doesn’t have any assets to buy InfoWars back because he is in personal bankruptcy, hence the sale) but by one of his advertisers on the site. It is clear that they didn’t think they would have any competition because without Jones there is no real value to InfoWars other than the production equipment and whatever shitty supplements he had in inventory, and they were caught flatfooted making a lowball bid when Global Tetrahedron made a bid more favorable to the creditors with its promise by Sandy Hook families to relinquish their claims. The judge really has no business arguing what price the company assets should e sold for beyond anything in the instructions, and whether or not he is “totally in Jones pocket” he is clearly demonstrating bias in overruling the trustee without any real cause other than thinking that the auction didn’t produce enough money (most of which, again, will go to the families).
To the extent that any of this matters, The Onion already got their turn to make a laughingstock of Jones and they don’t really need the InfoWars site or intellectual property to do that, and even if they prevailed nothing stops Jones and his backers from setting up a new channel under different branding and continuing to spew toxic conspiranoia from every orifice like a diarrhetic toddler who ate a giant bowl of sweet potatoes. Continuing to run InfoWars ‘under new management’ is a slap in the face to the Sandy Hook families who won a punitive judgement intended to shut Jones down but this fucking Energizer Nazi is going to keep running, and running, and running, until he drops a weight on his head or falls head first down a flight of stairs in a drunken rage.
Stranger