The Auctioning Off of Alex Jones' Companies

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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/judge-set-to-approve-liquidation-of-alex-joness-assets-in-november-auction/

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.

Who in the f*** would even BUY this stuff? It's not a business opportunity. It's not a sale of a legit freestanding business. It's a destruction of Alex Jones' personal passion project.

I'm hoping:

1) the meaningful assets go for comparatively very little because of the personal branding of everything in the auction (IE, the domain name .com goes for a million or two and that's the best asset).

2) Then someone like Elon Musk buys InfoWars the way that someone buys a the contents of foreclosed storage locker to see what can be gotten. He hires Alex Jones to run it and they're back on the air.

The whole thing has an air of unreality to me. Alex Jones himself is a bit unreal. Sandy Hook was a bit unreal. The billion dollar fine was a bit unreal. The mandated auction is a bit unreal. Actually the fine is more than a bit unreal and the mandate is totally unreal, even unprecedented. Taken together, it's too much. I'm not convinced of any of it.

Could be. I see your point.

I never really got into Alex Jones. He does some crazy stuff, but he stays in a narrow range. It's mostly of the type "Bad thing X is a false flag!"

In a certain sense, Alex Jones fills a useful idiot role. Produce content for people who are aware that something is wrong, but he never actually says anything really dangerous.

He made himself a meme back in the 1990s and therefore is never taken seriously or literally.

But he has called EVERYTHING we see today, years in advance.

Not a useful idiot really. More of a perpetual irritant to the powers that be.

I personally believe that Alex Jones has some unquantifiable spiritual prophecy gifts but he also has a perfect track record, at least of future events if not timing. He's always seemed to "just know".

It seems like "killing" Jones' presence is the entire point.

You figured it out at the end. It's about ruining Alex Jones. The actual money collected in damages is irrelevant.

The less they can sell Infowars for, the better. Lawsuit damages usually can't be discharged in bankruptcy. If Alex Jones starts a new business, they can seize it and sell it again.

The actual subject of the lawsuit is also irrelevant (Sandy Hook). They could have picked any of the controversial things he said, sue him over it, win and ruin him. That's the whole point of lawfare. Even if Alex Jones won the lawsuit, it would still be a success, because they would force him to spend money and energy defending the lawsuit, which he generally wouldn't recover even if he won.

For Alex Jones, they didn't even have to go to trial. The judge said Alex Jones didn't cooperate with discovery and gave a default judgement against him. That only works against non-insiders. One place I worked, they got a subpoena, decided the results would be too embarrassing, so they ignored the subpoena. If you have enough political influence, you can get away with that. There are two sets of rules, one for the elite, and the other for whoever the elite are trying to ruin.

They have access to nearly unlimited amounts of money. They have on their side almost the entire government, the entire financial industry, and almost every large corporation.

They can afford to give $$$$ to every illegal immigrant entering the country. Some people are reporting that illegals are getting more in welfare than poor US citizens. Of course they don't care about the tiny amount of money they collect bankrupting Alex Jones.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit might get a couple hundred thousand each. That doesn't matter. If they wanted to, they could give them a couple million each by purchasing the book and movie rights to their story.

The point is to set an example, that they have the power to ruin anyone who crosses them in any way. It doesn't matter if it's Alex Jones, Scott Adams, Mike Lindell, Gina Carano, Donald Trump, Kanye West, Roseanne Barr, James O'Keefe, Stefan Molyneux, JK Rowling, Elon Musk, anyone. If you cross them, they will ruin you. There are some people who object to what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter, and they're planning a lawfare campaign against him. (And I didn't even have to spend that long coming up with the list of names. There are lots more I left out.)

Why would they light billions of dollars of cash on fire by making woke Star Wars, along with pretty much every other popular movie franchise? That's because it's about power, not profit. If some movies were woke and some were not woke, then people would flock to the non-woke movies and it would be obvious they're pushing unpopular nonsense. If every single movie is woke, then people won't notice and they would just wonder why they didn't like seeing movies anymore.

You also see this in the gaming industry, where pretty much every AAA game has to have a woke plot. But the gaming industry isn't 100% locked down like the mainstream media. Steam doesn't engage in political censorship with games, a policy that will probably end once Gabe Newell retires and Steam is bought out by someone like Microsoft. An indie dev with a small budget can make a good game and get it in front of customers, which would be nearly impossible with TV or movies. You still see some non-woke games that sell really well, like Black Myth Wukong or Stellar Blade.

When you're selling a lie, you need to make it expensive and painful for anyone who disagrees. That's why they have to ruin anyone who disagrees with them in any way. If you agree with them 99% of the time but disagree with them on something, now they're going to try to ruin you.

It's even better if the rules aren't written down, for what's allowed and what will end your career. That will force everyone to engage in aggressive self-censorship. Most celebrities and CEOs are replaceable. They'll lose a lot of money if they're unpersoned, but the business they were running will do fine with someone else, and some new celebrity can always be promoted as the next star.

It's the Asch Conformity Test. If you have 99 people telling lies and 1 person telling the truth, then the truth teller can have a big impact. If there's only people telling lies, most people won't even be aware they're being lied to. The Internet isn't even a resource for researching non-approved ideas anymore, because Big Tech controls everything. After Trump won in 2016, they ramped up their censorship efforts.

You have to think like an evil person. An evil person only cares about relative wealth instead of absolute wealth. They would rather be supreme ruler of a pile of rubble, than be a wealthy person in an advanced civilization where they aren't in charge.

They hate the system in the USA. A talented, ambitious, and lucky person can theoretically rise up the ranks and join the elite. They hate that possibility, and want to ruin the USA to make sure that nobody else can ever amass as much wealth and power that they have. They want a system like China, where anyone who displeases them can be sent to a death camp, or Russia where anyone inconvenient can be assassinated (like they're trying to do with Trump).

They're collapsing the USA on purpose. They think they will still be in charge, with even more firm control, after the collapse. They've been playing this power game for centuries and winning, so the odds are in their favor. They are very close to succeeding in crashing the USA. There are people trying to sound the alarm and turn things around, but I fear it might be too late. As someone who's already getting old, if the USA falls I probably just die in the ensuing civil war. There isn't even someplace else to go, because when the US fails the problem will be global.

Alex Jones wasn't even that effective. He would make a 2 hour video on one simple idea. Who has time to watch all that?

The whole point is to ruin Alex Jones, make an example of him, make sure nobody else challenges them like Alex Jones tried. There are so many complex laws that they have enough ammunition to ruin anyone if they decide it's necessary.

This case is a political hit job against Jones with an obscene penalty awarded to the families that isn't in line with what he actually did. This is our unfair, biased legal system on display. They finally got him on something.

"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."

Yes. They're out to ruin him financially now and silence him in the future.

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P.A.G.A.N. - People Against Goodness And Normalcy

The Auctioning Off of Alex Jones' Companies (Public Board)

And another Q

And another Q

Alex Jones himself a crisis actor?

Alex Jones himself a crisis actor?

Actually

It's About Power, Not Money