A company tied to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones filed Monday to dispute the sale of the Infowars website to the parody site The Onion, calling it improper and unfair.
In the morning, First United American Cos., a limited liability company that runs Jones’ online supplements store, filed an emergency motion to disqualify the winning bid of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron,’ to purchase the Infowars media empire and other assets. The filing alleged that the bankruptcy trustee improperly colluded with Connecticut families who won nearly $1.5 billion in legal judgments against Jones after he called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax. The company running Jones’ online store had placed a competing bid against The Onion to purchase the estate.
In its filing, FUAC said its final and best bid was $3.5 million for all of Jones’ assets, while it said The Onion’s bid was $1.75 million cash, in addition to a waiver from the Connecticut families promising some proceeds from the sale of Infowars’ assets, which Connecticut families valued at $2.625 million, according to the filing. FUAC said accepting The Onion’s bid was “collusion” and argued that including the “contingent” waiver in its valuation was “improper.”
Shortly after the emergency filing Monday, the trustee, the court-appointed person overseeing Jones’ estate, filed a preliminary response calling the emergency motion “a disappointed bidder’s improper attempt to influence an otherwise fair and open auction process.”
“Having failed in its prior efforts to bully the Trustee and his advisors into accepting its inferior bid, FUAC now alleges, without evidence, collusion and bad faith in an attempt to mislead the Court and disqualify its only competition in the auction,” the filing continued. “The Trustee intends to respond in due course fully and in detail to the barrage of baseless allegations, selective quoting and half-truths in FUAC’s recent filings.”
The back-and-forth legal squabble followed days of celebration by The Onion and its supporters, as well as denial and rebuke from Jones, that the parody news organization would take over his platform. Infowars was briefly shut down after the sale was announced, NBC News reported, but it has resumed operating since.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m going to be here until they come and turn the lights off,” Jones said Thursday. On Monday, Jones shared the emergency motion on his social media platforms and referred to The Onion’s purchase as “auction fraud” and a “fraudulent sale.”
Jones has also claimed that Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump are investigating the bankruptcy auction in his favor, noting that Musk’s X Corp. filed a notice of appearance in the case, which involves the potential transfer of Jones’ X handle in the sale.
Jones, one of the best-known and most controversial conspiracy theorists, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in late 2022 after he was found liable for defamation in the case with the families of victims in the Sandy Hook school shooting. The proceeds from the sale of Infowars and Jones’ other assets will go toward his estate creditors, including the families of Sandy Hook victims. An attorney for the families has said The Onion did “a public service and will meaningfully hinder Jones’ ability to do more harm.”
The Onion’s chief executive, Ben Collins — who previously covered disinformation and conspiracy theories for NBC News — contested Jones’ version of events, writing that the judge had questions about the process and assets but that the process should be completed at a hearing on Nov. 25.
“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,” Collins wrote on X and Bluesky. “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.”
Collins wrote that The Onion plans to relaunch Infowars as “the dumbest website on the internet.” A person with knowledge of the sale has told NBC News that The Onion plans to rebuild the platform with well-known internet humor writers and content creators.
