The Onion won the auction for Infowars and was given ‘clear next steps to complete the sale,’ CEO says
After a judge on Thursday ordered an evidentiary hearing into The Onion’s winning bid to purchase Infowars, Alex Jones’ site resumed operations and claimed the sale has been blocked. But Onion CEO Ben Collins countered this in an update posted on Bluesky and X on Saturday, writing, “We left the hearing with clear next steps to complete the sale.” According to Collins, a court date has been set for a week from Monday, when the process is expected to be completed, and Infowars asked for permission to continue publishing in the meantime. “The long and short of it: We won the auction and — you’re not going to believe this — the previous InfoWars folks aren’t taking it well,” Collins wrote.
“On Thursday, the person overseeing the auction told us that The Onion’s bid for InfoWars, along with the Connecticut Sandy Hook families, won,” Collins wrote in the thread. “We haven’t heard anything that changed that — except, of course, from the guys currently running InfoWars, doing InfoWars stuff.” Jones has unsurprisingly called the auction “rigged,” and in a livestream on X said that lawyers for Elon Musk’s social media site have gotten involved and attended the hearing, Mother Jones reported.
The Onion only went up against one other bidder in the auction for Infowars: First United American Companies, which is associated with a website that sells Jones’ supplements. The company reportedly bid $3.5 million. The dollar amount of Global Tetrahedron’s (The Onion’s parent company) bid has not been disclosed, but it’s been backed by families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims. Per Bloomberg, trustee Christopher Murray, who is liquidating Jones’ estate, said these families have “agreed to waive their potential recovery and give it to all other unsecured creditors” that Jones owes.
“There was a status conference with the judge overseeing the auction on Thursday, shortly after we were deemed winners,” Collins, who formerly covered disinformation and online extremism as a reporter for NBC News, wrote in the thread on Saturday. “The judge had some questions about process and some assets. We’re glad he’s doing that, since our bid with the families is clearly the best and transparency is even better.” He added further down: “We expected all of this, obviously. Buying this site was always going to be fun later on, but annoying right away. The fun part is still to come.”
Collins’ plan for Infowars is for it to “relaunch as the dumbest website on the internet.” The nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety will reportedly be the sole advertiser at launch.
