Satirical News Outlet The Onion Buys Alex Jones' Infowars At Auction
Alex Jones’ Infowars conspiracy theory media empire was bought by satirical news organization The Onion, the company reported Thursday.
A private auction for Infowars took place Wednesday morning as part of a personal bankruptcy plan to pay the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting after Jones spent years falsely claiming the shooting that left 20 kids and six adults dead never happened, and that those whose loved ones were killed were actors.
Ben Collins, chief executive at The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said on social media that Infowars was bought with the blessing of the Sandy Hook families affected by Jones’ misinformation campaign. The new Infowars, he said, will be relaunched by employees of The Onion and eventually look like a parody of itself — to include ads by Everytown for Gun Safety, an anti-gun violence nonprofit launched after the Sandy Hook shooting.
“We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website,” Collins wrote on social media app Bluesky. “We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off. I can’t wait to show you what we have cooked up.”
Details on the sale, including how much The Onion offered for Infowars, were not immediately available. Because the auction was private, the names of bidders were not disclosed. This also means there wasn’t a chance for a competitive bidding process.
Jones lost two court cases in 2022 after several Sandy Hook families sued him for defamation and won nearly $1.5 billion in damages against him.
Chris Mattei, attorney for the Connecticut families that sued Jones in 2022, said in a statement that “true accountability meant an end to Infowars and an end to Jones’ ability to spread lies, pain and fear at scale.”
“By divesting Jones of Infowars’ assets, the families and the team at The Onion have done a public service and will meaningfully hinder Jones’ ability to do more harm,” Mattei added.
John Feinblatt, president of Everytown, said the group is proud of “what comes next.”
“It’s fitting that a platform once used to profit off of tragedy will be a tool of education, hence our multi-year advertising commitment to this new venture,” Feinblatt said in a statement. “We’re proud to be a part of what comes next, not only in terms of staunching the flow of hurtful misinformation, but also for the potential this new venture has to help Everytown reach new audiences ready to hold the gun industry accountable for contributing to our nation’s gun violence epidemic.”
Christopher Murray, a federal court-appointed trustee, will distribute the funds from the auction sale to estate creditors, including Sandy Hook families Jones defamed.
Along with the Infowars name and website, bidders had the opportunity to purchase a Winnebago motor home and an armored truck. Items that weren’t sold at Wednesday’s auction will be sold in a second auction to take place in December.
On Wednesday, Jones told his Infowars audience that he would fight in court if the “good guys don’t get it.”
But by Thursday morning, after learning about the sale of his company to The Onion, Jones’ mood had soured.
“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 he posted on X, formerly Twitter.
He later falsely accused the Sandy Hook families of working with the FBI and CIA to destroy him.
“Again, it’s insane,” Jones ranted on his show. “When I go to these court hearings, these people are here. They just smile at me, wait by the door. And it’s like they live on me and talk about me and I’m their persecutor because I’m famous and successful and barely ever talk about them, so they’re attached to me. And the FBI and the CIA cooked all this up.”
At a court hearing in Houston on Thursday afternoon, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez expressed frustration at how the auction was handled. Walter Cicack, an attorney for First United American Companies, told Lopez that the trustee, Murray, changed the auction process days before by excluding a round of competitive bidding and making the auction private.
“I personally don’t care who wins in the bid,” Lopez said. “I care about process. I care about transparency in the process.”
Murray did not respond to a request for comment. Lopez said he would hold an evidentiary hearing next week.
Although the Infowars website was taken offline Thursday, it was back up on Friday, with Jones falsely claiming that the “illegal sale” of the website was “now under criminal investigation.”
Collins told HuffPost in a statement that the sale of Infowars to The Onion is still going through.
“The joint bid from Global Tetrahedron and the Connecticut families has been selected as the winning bid for Infowars,” Collins said. “The sale is currently underway as part of the standard process.”
Jones did not respond to a request for comment.
