A Texas bankruptcy court ruled on Tuesday that The Onion‘s acquisition of Alex Jones‘ disinformation empire, Infowars, could not move forward, dealing a blow to the satirical newspaper. The most surreal media merger in recent memory is now set to disintegrate — at least for now — after almost a month of legal wrangling.
“I don’t think it’s enough money,” U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez wrote in a late-night decision, per NBC News. “I’m going to not approve the sale.” Judge Lopez has left it up to trustee Christopher Murray to decide what to do next. It’s possible that there could be another auction, in which the Onion could once again place bid for the embattled conspiracy theorist’s publication. He could also decide to reexamine the Jones-associated company First United American, which offered a revised bid that has not yet been disclosed, per the AP.
In 2022, Jones was ordered to pay a total of nearly $1.5 billion in civil damages to the families of victims in the deadly 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. Jones had falsely and repeatedly claimed on Infowars that the massacre was a hoax, smearing parents of children who were killed as “crisis actors” — incendiary attacks that saw the grieving families subjected to years of harassment and intimidation by viewers who believed Jones’ lies. In the course of multiple defamation lawsuits brought against him and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, Jones testified that, contrary to his earlier statements, the Sandy Hook shooting was “100 percent real.”
This year, having failed to pay what he owed the victims’ families, Jones asked a judge to convert his personal bankruptcy to a Chapter 7 to liquidate his assets, including the Infowars brand, in order to at least partially cover the massive settlement. The court ruled in September that he could put Free Speech Systems up for auction.
The process took a surprising turn in November, when The Onion revealed that it had placed the winning bid in the court-ordered auction. It was another attention-grabbing stunt for the beloved parody publisher, which had just three months earlier revived its print edition under new parent company Global Tetrahedron, a firm with a jokingly ominous name created to acquire the title from its previous owner in April, with former NBC News reporter Ben Collins stepping in as CEO of the paper. The Onion announced that it would relaunch Infowars and its social channels in January 2025 as sources of irreverent comedy rather than paranoiac diatribes, vowing “to end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good.” The brand also partnered with the gun control activism nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety on an ad deal for the revamped Infowars.
Jones was apoplectic over the sale and aired a broadcast that saw him raving that “imperial troops” were storming his studio to seize it from him. That didn’t happen, and a company with links to the right-wing firebrand soon mounted a legal challenge to the takeover: First American United Companies, affiliated with Jones’ dietary supplements business, alleged that The Onion had bid only $1.75 million for Infowars, compared to its offer of $3.5 million, and had therefore won the auction through collusion and fraud. Murray, the bankruptcy trustee overseeing the liquidation of Free Speech Systems, said the First American bid was actually “inferior,” as the total value of The Onion‘s deal stood at $7 million — because most of the Sandy Hook families had agreed to receive a percentage of revenues from an Onion-owned Infowars instead of cash from the sale itself. (These were the only two sealed bids in the auction.)
Meanwhile, Elon Musk — who a year ago made the controversial decision to reinstate Jones’ account on X, formerly Twitter, despite his permanent suspensions from nearly every other social media platform — also took action against the purchase. In legal objection to the sale filed by X in November, the company pointed out that according to its user agreement, they are the owner of Jones’ and Infowars’ accounts on the site, and have no obligation to turn them over to an entity that purchases Free Speech Systems’ collective assets. The unusually aggressive move was a stark reminder that users of such websites do not have ultimate control of their profiles, and threw a potential wrench in The Onion‘s scheme to turn Jones’ digital footprint into a mockery of everything he stands for.
Murray testified on Tuesday before Judge Lopez of the U.S. District and Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of Texas that The Onion‘s offer should be approved over First American’s. In his own testimony, auctioneer Jeff Tanenbaum defended the sale process when Jones’ lawyers pressed him over not holding a live auction.
Jones himself did not attend court this week but used his show to continue complaining about the prospect of The Onion wresting control of his once lucrative conspiracy theory factory. “I can’t imagine the judge would certify this fraud,” he told his audience on Tuesday. “I mean it’s head-spinning the stuff they did and what they claimed.”
Now that the judge has spoken, it’s up to Christopher Murray to decide what happens next — and whether the cathartic punchline of the Sandy Hook families having some say over Infowars’ fate could finally come to pass.