The satirical news site The Onion purchased InfoWars last Thursday for the sum of $1.75 million. The buyout being the culmination of years of litigation and bankruptcy proceedings following InfoWars’ founder Alex Jones defamation lawsuit, brought on by the families of the Sandy Hook massacre.
The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron LLC, bought InfoWars in a bankruptcy auction and announced it in a fittingly sardonic post. The fictitious CEO of Global Tetrahedron, called InfoWars an “Invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses — no price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds.”
In October of 2022, a Connecticut jury ordered Jones to pay $965 million in damages to the families of eight victims of the Sandy Hook massacre for the suffering caused by years of lies that the shooting was a hoax, which Jones promoted through InfoWars.
An Alex Jones-affiliated company, First American United Companies, has since disputed The Onion’s purchase, claiming that the site won a rigged bankruptcy auction and offered half as much cash as its bid asked. The Jones affiliate company has requested the U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston to disqualify the bid by the Onion and name its own $3.5-million bid as the winner.
Jones has since publicly claimed that the auction was overturned by a judge, meanwhile Onion Chief Executive Ben Collins contested Jones’ turn of events stating that the buyout process is resuming as normal. “We always knew the guys who currently run InfoWars were going to take this badly and use the loss to fundraise off of it, and they did not disappoint — obviously, when the current operators of InfoWars went back to operating as a business, they used that to falsely say the auction had been overturned and allege some truly wacky stuff,” said Collins on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Collins went on to state that the judge had questions about the process and assets but that the process should be completed at a hearing on November 2nd. Collins also stated that The Onion plans to relaunch Infowars as “the dumbest website on the internet,” they plan to rebuild the platform with well-known internet comic writers and content creators.
