Summary
A federal judge has delayed approving the sale of Alex Jones’ media company, Infowars, to The Onion, amid disputes over the auction process.
The Onion won with a $1.75 million bid supported by Sandy Hook families, who agreed to forego their share of sale proceeds for future revenue from a revamped Infowars, enabling other creditors to collect more.
However, a competing bidder backed by Jones, First United American Companies, contested the sale, claiming its $3.5 million bid was unfairly rejected.
The judge plans an evidentiary hearing to ensure transparency.
More of that “free market” Republicans and Neoliberals love crowing about on display.
Can’t have commerce happening for prosocial reasons, only greed!
i mean, if Jones is in bankruptcy the whole point is to pay his debts to who he owes, some of which i believe are the parkland families. so you want to sell it for the largest total amount in order to pay off as much debt as possible.
if a company really did offer $3.5m and was rejected meanwhile The Onion is getting accepted for $1.75m, I’d like to know why. I don’t think a company should get free dibs just because they’re more or less “ethical” than another. at the end of the day, they’re a for-profit corporation that is going to use this as a way to make money.
i don’t believe for one second this has anything to do with “prosociality”
The major reason is that the Parkland families agreed to take a smaller payout as part of the Onion deal. Therefore, it enables more of the creditors to actually get paid (as opposed to the other deal, where the Parkland families would get almost all the money and the rest of the creditors would be left hat-in-hand).
Thanks for the info. If the creditors agree to take a lowered payout, than it makes sense. I wasn’t aware of any such deal before making my comment.
I don’t want to dox myself but I know Parkland very well. The people who live there are loaded. So it makes sense they aren’t hurting for money and would just prefer the Infowars website to be neutered, which it seems is the Onion’s goal.
Also the onion deal pays out a percentage revenues to the creditors over a set amount of time (I forget exactly how long), where as the other deal is one and done. So POTENTIALLY the earning potential is much higher with the onion deal, but I think the point of the onion deal was to bury infowars.
Detailed answer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GmDNz7irGgw
TLDW: there’s two main parties (excluding lawyers and that kinda stuff) who would receive the money. As it stands right now, one of them would receive 98%, whereas the other would be left with barely anything. The Onion made a deal, that would cut into that 98%, and give the other party 100000 dollars more than what they would get with any other bid if it was shared according to the “proper” split. In return the 98% party gets paid out the rest of their due (potentially more, potentially less) with revenue from running the site.
I watched the video when it came out. If memory serves me correctly, the 98% party are parents from North Carolina, the others are from Texas. The percentage I wrote is probably wrong too. But it’s definitely a massive discrepancy. The Onion worked this deal out in collaboration with both parties, and there’s definitely a prosocial aspect in the NC parents declining a large chunk od money so the other victims can get more. Though both the NC parents and The Onion could potentially earn back that amount by running the website.
I believe you got the percentages correct (I watched the video yesterday).
To everyone looking at the bidding numbers only – they don’t include a lot of concessions the NC parents gave to both the Texas parents and the Onion in order to keep AJ out of the deal.
The video goes into great detail about how the deal came to be, and how the Onion and NC parents worked HARD to make it the most attractive one to both the trustee and Texas parents.
I think the video LegalEagle uploaded explains it quite succinctly: for the sale there was a certain split between the debtors, the debtors with the largest portion were willing to forego a portion such that the other debtors would get a larger portion if The Onion’s bid was the winning one. In effect, the other debtors would get more money out of the 1.75m than the 3.5m bid, and the debtors that ‘got less’ are the ones that offered the money in the first place.
My understanding is that the families are willing to forgive the debt to them if the onion is the purchaser. If you add the value of that to the bid, it far outweighs the 3.5 million.