
The Auctioning Off of Alex Jones' Companies (Public Board)
I posted this speculation on Reddit/Cot and small brained xampl9 didn't have anything insightful to contribute.
Hopefully a big brained type such as business minded FSK can pitch in $0.02.
So the gist is: everything branded Alex Jones or Infowars will be auctioned off. Jones owes $1.5 billion in penalties for his statements years ago on Sandy Hook, and the proceeds will help to pay this debt down.
The concept of "selling Infowars" doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. To me it looks like a forced implosion of a going business - an act of pure destruction. Basically, anything InfoWars has high value now because it's the public face of Alex Jones. Remove him and you have almost nothing of value.
In other words I'm asserting that compared to his present and expected cash flow, the auction will yield chicken feed of negligible value. Perhaps a 100:1 ratio of value intact versus the "realized" value of everything auctioned and dismantled.
Infowars probably has a value of perhaps a few hundred million over its lifetime going forward, but instead the auction demolished it for a few tens of millions return.
So "selling a business" encompasses:
Selling off real estate and properties (ok, will be value there for certain)
Selling off chattels (IE, cameras, furniture, studio lights, etc) (some value if you broker used studio shit)
Any profitable businesses operating under that umbrella - including his supplements and vitamins business. (great value but there is a big catch, explained in a few.)
Selling the actual show(s) (Does this mean that someone winds up with Owen Shroyer on a gimp leash? lol) (again, great value but a catch.)
Selling his social media presences. (ibid)
And the domain name(s) - which are also intimately in this case co-mingled with the "business goodwill" meaning the actual identity and "person" of the business.
Perhaps media content. Although the auctions seem to be designed to bury anything Jones has ever touched.
Almost EVERYTHING "Infowars" has value because of Jones' continued involvement in it. Once auctioned it's explicit that he's not involved.
His vitamin/supplement business will probably collapse if customers now know that they're not supporting him in any way. I guess you'd wind up with a customer list that could be remarketed to some nutrition company such as GNC.
The "infowars.com" domain, might be valuable to some news organization that wants to redirect it to their own things. But as a named property it means nothing because it's tied to Jones' persona. A spammer might get value out of it maybe.
The show won't continue because all of the participants - writers, editors, voice actors, etc will scatter - the cause is gone.
To me this seems like censorship: just wipe InfoWars and Alex Jones' presence off the face of the earth. Allowing Jones to keep operating as is and demanding a royalty in perpetuity seems more profitable to the plaintiffs. But that really does not seem to be the point.
I expect that part of whatever deal he finally reaches with the court includes sanctions that say that he never lends his name to any editorial or publicly branded product or service ever again or else he faces new rounds of legal actions. My guess is this will or has already happened.
It seems like "killing" Jones' presence is the entire point. If they wind up with a few tens of millions, so be it, but money is not the point.