The Onion snatches up Alex Jones’ Infowars IP, online store assets at auction

HOUSTON (CN) — Infowars, the long-running show of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, is set to be sold to satirical publication The Onion after they made the highest bid in a court-ordered, closed-door auction Wednesday.

Facing more than $1.5 billion in defamation judgments over his false claims about the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, Jones and his company filed for bankruptcy in 2022. After two years of trying and failing to reach a deal with the attorneys for the creditors and the Sandy Hook, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez converted Jones’ personal bankruptcy case to Chapter 7 liquidation but dismissed the corporate bankruptcy case.

ThreeSixty Asset Advisors, the firm running the auctions, pitched three packages for bidding in its listing for the auction. The first, for the production side of Infowars, included production rights, website domains, and subscriber lists. The second, for the show’s online store, included the domain, the trademarks on products sold on the site, and the lists of vendors and customers. The third package is a set of “approximately 300 domain names,” which the auction house did not identify publicly.

After the liquidation process began, The Onion mounted a joint bid with the Connecticut families of Sandy Hook victims. The amount they bid has not yet been disclosed, but court documents published Thursday morning confirmed the publication as the winning bidder.

Full details of the sale are expected to be filed next week.

Along with an article in the site’s traditional satirical style, The Onion said in a joint news release with Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy nonprofit, that the nonprofit would be the exclusive advertiser on the platform.

“The Onion’s goal with the acquisition is 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 organizations wrote.

Despite the secrecy of the auction, rumors had swirled about who might be interested in buying out these items. In early October NPR reported potential buyers from the left and right of the American political spectrum. Jones himself claimed there was a wide array of interest in the auctions on an August episode of the show.

From the right, Roger Stone, a longstanding Republican operative and ally of Alex Jones, and Elon Musk, the billionaire set to play a sizeable role in Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, were both among the speculated potential buyers. Neither had confirmed their interests to any news outlets, including AP, who first reported on Stone’s interest, but many users on X, formerly Twitter, called for Musk to buy Jones’ show to keep it going.

On the opposite side of the aisle, Ben Collins, a former NBC journalist and the CEO of the satirical outlet The Onion, teased his interest in a post on Bluesky in June, though he has not made any open statements on the matter since then. Several other progressive media organizations have been floated as potential buyers to shut down the Infowars show, including Media Matters, according to a September report by Semafor.

Any production equipment not sold at this auction will be sold off piecemeal in a Dec. 10 auction.

Jones has so far successfully pushed back on a late October attempt to include his many personal social media accounts in the list of saleable assets. These were not included in the November auction, and are awaiting a decision by Judge Lopez.