This seems roundabout. If Elon Musk objects to The Onion using InfoWars' X accounts, can't he just make up a reason to ban them after the sale goes through? It's not like X can't unilaterally and arbitrarily close accounts.
The judge will either approve or reject the bankruptcy trustee's decision, and it will inevitably go up on appeal either way.
The real question for me is: why does Elon Musk want to (further) sully his reputation by swooping in to save the guy who defamed a bunch of dead kids? I just don't see the upside for him, swimming in this particular sewer.
Yeah, pretty scary. Well at least he brought this issue to my attention. Since then I have actually put effort into filtering the water I let go into my body. So that's good.
Yeah, there's that section of the population that is all "oh no, you can't tacitly approve of listening to [thing] or [some opinion] because that's a bad think". And then there's the rest of the population that just doesn't give a shit and won't hesitate to say "yeah, the government is not your fucking dad, maybe it's time to grow up".
I for one would like to see Alex Jones on the DOGE committee because of all the things he was up to in the decades past. Not a popular opinion I know, but there it is.
Don't you think there is someone that is anti-surveillance and anti-authoritarian (dunno if Jones is still?) that is more stable that would fit better?
Alex maintains 35 to 40 employees at any given time and has like a 99.99% uptime of running a 3-hour show plus at least two other shows (2-hour and 1-hour) every single day.
He shouts a lot (tough shit I guess), and some people don't like that. Irrespective of opinions about his viewpoints no one can argue that he works like an Ox.
I'm an SRE that other SREs consider reliable (lmao) and I don't have half that discipline.
I'll address the twitter thing first, cause thats what the link is about, I'll get on to your question, but thats gonna be a WALL OF TEXT, and I can answer the twitter thing pretty quickly.
Initially the trustee wanted to sell off the Twitter Handles associated with Alex Jones and Infowars. Judge ruled that Alex's own personal account handle was his name, and the court couldn't force him to sell off his own name (or something like that, trying to be brief) but the Inforwars handle was fair game.
Twitter claim that handles on the platform are not actually the "property" of the account holder, and because of which they are not AJ's/Infowars's to sell, so should not be included in the sale. Judge is gonna take at up at a later time iirc. They don't really have any arguement against the onion buying inforwars, just the twitter handles.
But Twitter point does make some sense, for an example, if account handles were to be considered property with value, it could make it a PITA to ever ban someone from the platform as the platform would be interfering in the value of that property by taking moderation actions on the account. - Would also make it a PITA if the platform wanted to repurpose an existing handle for something else.
-----
Ok onto the wall of text that is answering your question. the TL;DR version of it is: We don't know yet! There seems to be the appearance of fuckery (thats what AJ/FSS/FUAC are claiming) and until the judge can be sure that no fuckery took place things are on hold.
-----
Now for the WOT!!!
During a bankruptcy, a bankruptcy court main role is to make sure that the maximum is extracted from the assets in a public manner. This is good for the public at large and the creditors of what ever entity is going though the bankruptcy.
It wouldn't be very beneficial to those evolved if a $1 million property was sold for $1 in a closed and opaque way (Well apart from the buyer, who just got a steal).
The judge in this case decided that a number of assets would be sold off in an auction, initially the terms of that auction would be what a avg person would think what an auction is. Parties would get to place bids, and other parties would be able to put in counter bids, rinse and repeat until the price stops going up. This is seen as a fair way to extract the maximum value out of the sale, if someone thinks the current bid is undervalued they are free to place a higher bid.
Now with this sale, there were some caveats, for example having to place deposits down on their bids, allowing the trustee of the bankruptcy to "have a peek at a buyers funds" to make sure they are available and the bidding party isn't just fucking around - nothing wrong there, all this was laid out in the terms of the auction, terms approved by the judge overseeing the case. The problem is that those terms were changed at the last minute without the judges approval to change the auction style to a closed bid system. Parties would submit their best and final offer for the assets they wanted and the trustee would decide which of those bids were the best bid.
(problem is, that some parties only wanted some of the assets if others were included, so if asset A wasn't included in a lot (because party b out bid them on that asset) party A no long wanted the rest of the lot, or valued the lot at a much lower price. aka its fucking complicated. this is the "defence" the trustee gave too the judge as to why they thought that doing closed bids was the best way forward, however they never got that pre-approved by the judge (This didn't make the judge happy).
FUAC lawyers argued that because they were not aware of value of The onions bid, they were not able to offer a counter bid.
The Onion were declared the winner (in a news report before the fillings were made) but the "issue" with the onion's bid is that there is a LOT of credit being used in the bid.
After the bids became public, it turned out that FUAC's bid was for $3.5million. The Onion's bid was for $1.75million, however some of the creditors for the assets said they would forgo any of their claim on the auction proceeds due to them to give other creditors a total of $100,000 more than they would receive under other bids (and with the pending judgement they have, which is going to be very hard to collect on fully anyway because its so large - this could be used to "inflate" the sale price, but still only leave $1.75million in cash for the other creditors - it should also be noted that that judgement being used to back this offer is still under appeal and not yet final).
The problem is the judge also didn't approve of this style of credit before hand either.
Now, the judge does have the final say in who won any auction, but normally there isn't any issues with the process, so its just a matter of "rubber stamping" the order after the sale. With this believe in mind The Onion, now declared winners of the assets started taking control of the assets before the order had been signed by off by the Judge, The Onion claim this was done to prevent any value loss/damage to be done, which you know isn't the worse idea in the world, esp if the party currently "owning" the assets is pretty hostile to the sale, but a protective order could have been filed with the court before the close of the auction requiring this, IIRC this wasn't done. Instead they went in and just started shutting everything down.
The judge was not happy about any of this. The judge ended the hearing saying no body should be happy with the result of this and demanded a halt (well more a pause) to the sale and to have a hearing into what actually went down. After which the judge has the option to say "Do the auction again, and here are the hard line rules of said auction", disqualify The Onions bid and allow it to go to the 2nd best bid by FUAC, or allow the sale to the Onion to proceed. But until then the Onion can't just close everything down and Infowars regained control of the assets until the Judge can have a closer look at what really went down.
The problem is, it feels like its a case of "Bad facts trying to make bad law". Sure I found it very funny to hear that the Onion were buy Infowars, I mean its a pretty expensive joke imo because the value of Infowars in Jones he is the sales man that makes the company money, without him the value of the company quickly goes to zero after the notivey wears off, but turning a blind eye "allegedly fucking around with the process" to fuck over AJ because he is a bad man doesn't sit right with me.
Some of your statements are wildly inaccurate. The trustee’s job is to maximize recovery for creditors, which they did, and the creditors worked with the winning bidder to make this happen. Alex Jones is upset the auction was sealed and they couldn’t attempt to outbid anyone else. “I don’t like the rules.” is not a defense. Legitimate explanation from actual attorneys below.
> The auction process approved by Lopez did not require Murray to automatically select the bidder that submitted the highest amount, and the trustee could reject the bid that was "contrary to the best interests" of the estate creditors.
> Alex Jones is upset the auction was sealed and they couldn’t attempt to outbid anyone else.
The problem is that the judge himself in the emergency hearing on the matter disagreed that the auction should have been closed.
EDIT: Give me a sec and I'll go pull up the recording where I heard it from. (The section in question on where I heard the court recording, with commentary from actual lawyers, on the matter is 2 hours long, so I gotta find the right timestamp for that part where the judge is not happy at all)
Edit: The start of the segment where they cover the purchase gonna find the exact timestamp of the judge - https://youtu.be/ZqQNBhz9JHM?t=7463
Lopez is required to act in the best interest of the creditors, and the creditors can always get a better deal working with The Onion, because their interests are aligned.
> After next month's hearing, Judge Lopez would have the option to approve the sale, to order a new one or to flip the outcome and award Jones' media company to FUAC.
> But University of Florida Levin College of Law professor Christopher Hampson sees that third option as unlikely. He says the deal from The Onion and the families may be somewhat unusual, but it's not necessarily beyond the trustee's discretion. According to a court order, Murray has the authority to use his "reasonable business judgement" to set, modify and add "procedural rules that are reasonably necessary or advisable" and to select the "highest or otherwise best bid."
> "That is expansive language," Hampson says. "There are lots of totally fair ways of running an auction [and] it's not clear to me that the process was problematic in any way."
If a law professor doesn’t believe the process was deficient, what expertise would you rely on to come to an alternate conclusion?
I'm just going off what the judge in the case is saying in the hearings. The judge was not happy at all with how the auction was done as he had intended for it not to be a closed bid auction (the trustee may have sunk an order past him to kinda allow it)
https://youtu.be/ZqQNBhz9JHM?t=11820 Where the judge asks if he authorized waivers of recoveries and the trustee says the judge didn't. And the judge raises his issue about the lack of transparency in the process - which is the main issue here.
The onion's bid may be the better deal, but because of the sealed bid process the judge wasn't expecting, the bids from other parties could have been more, but its mainly about the lack of transparency in the process that the judge is pissed at.
The judge’s happiness is immaterial (I’m unsure why you’re focused on his emotional response, it doesn’t provide him additional options). What matters is his obligations to the creditors and written instructions to the trustee. Those are facts, both legally and public record (respectively).
If the judge intended a different auction process than what was held, or less expansive language directing the trustee (granting less authority to the trustee), that is their mistake.
And transparency of the process is one of those obligations to the creditors and to the population at large
> The judge’s happiness is immaterial
In an ideal world it would be, but we don't live in such a world. After watching a fair few US trials, pissing off the judge can quickly turn a case that would normally be a winner, into a loser you then have to go though the appeals process to try and fix.
Judges get very pissed when people hide shit from them. They also get very pissed when someone blatantly skirts existing law. They could actually face serious jailtime for that. They'll be very lucky if this doesn't backfire extremely hard on them.
Even wilder, a lot of people, mostly the Reddit/Bluesky types (you can imagine), are going to lose their fucking minds off of this.
What a fuckin' year this has been, and we're not even in the last month of it.
Meta: Why does HN allow pay-walled submissions? What percentage of HN users have a 404media account? Why even allow a post that the vast, vast, majority of HN users can't even read?
I feel like you'd also get more uninformed comments from people that could only read the headline and first paragraph or two, but are missing all the additional context from the rest of the article.
So say they don't "own" the account and it doesn't get transferred.
After the trademark is transferred, can't they still get the account shut down for impersonation?
https://help.x.com/en/rules-and-policies/x-trademark-policy
I assume Global Tetrahedron will file a trademark complaint with the USPTO if X does not comply.
Original title:
"X's Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts" [sic]*
This fits the char limit, still makes the point:
"X objects to The Onion buying InfoWars, says X owns your social media accounts"
* It's [t]he Onion News Network but [T]he Onion, surprised at 404 editors!
This seems roundabout. If Elon Musk objects to The Onion using InfoWars' X accounts, can't he just make up a reason to ban them after the sale goes through? It's not like X can't unilaterally and arbitrarily close accounts.
Judge says he must still approve sale of Infowars to The Onion
so... what is or is not actually happening with this??The judge will either approve or reject the bankruptcy trustee's decision, and it will inevitably go up on appeal either way.
The real question for me is: why does Elon Musk want to (further) sully his reputation by swooping in to save the guy who defamed a bunch of dead kids? I just don't see the upside for him, swimming in this particular sewer.
He seems stuck in the mind ofa 13 year old edgelord.
If anything the weird upbringing he had has stunted his development.
Alex Jones is, for better or worse, extremely popular. As in, he has more active daily listeners than Fox and CNN combined. Yeah, I know.
Elon Musk is boosting his reputation by assisting Alex Jones, or at least that's what Elon Musk believes.
> As in, he has more active daily listeners than Fox and CNN combined. Yeah, I know.
Wow, this is genuinely frightening.
Yeah, pretty scary. Well at least he brought this issue to my attention. Since then I have actually put effort into filtering the water I let go into my body. So that's good.
Wow. I had absolutely no idea. I thought he was considered a radioactive fringe figure.
Yeah, there's that section of the population that is all "oh no, you can't tacitly approve of listening to [thing] or [some opinion] because that's a bad think". And then there's the rest of the population that just doesn't give a shit and won't hesitate to say "yeah, the government is not your fucking dad, maybe it's time to grow up".
I for one would like to see Alex Jones on the DOGE committee because of all the things he was up to in the decades past. Not a popular opinion I know, but there it is.
Selling supplements to insecure men and dragging dead children through the mud?
It would atleast fit the meme theme.
Don't you think there is someone that is anti-surveillance and anti-authoritarian (dunno if Jones is still?) that is more stable that would fit better?
Alex maintains 35 to 40 employees at any given time and has like a 99.99% uptime of running a 3-hour show plus at least two other shows (2-hour and 1-hour) every single day.
He shouts a lot (tough shit I guess), and some people don't like that. Irrespective of opinions about his viewpoints no one can argue that he works like an Ox.
I'm an SRE that other SREs consider reliable (lmao) and I don't have half that discipline.
> DOGE committee
They are planning to replace the US dollar with DOGE coin? Seems about on par...
I'll address the twitter thing first, cause thats what the link is about, I'll get on to your question, but thats gonna be a WALL OF TEXT, and I can answer the twitter thing pretty quickly.
Initially the trustee wanted to sell off the Twitter Handles associated with Alex Jones and Infowars. Judge ruled that Alex's own personal account handle was his name, and the court couldn't force him to sell off his own name (or something like that, trying to be brief) but the Inforwars handle was fair game.
Twitter claim that handles on the platform are not actually the "property" of the account holder, and because of which they are not AJ's/Infowars's to sell, so should not be included in the sale. Judge is gonna take at up at a later time iirc. They don't really have any arguement against the onion buying inforwars, just the twitter handles.
But Twitter point does make some sense, for an example, if account handles were to be considered property with value, it could make it a PITA to ever ban someone from the platform as the platform would be interfering in the value of that property by taking moderation actions on the account. - Would also make it a PITA if the platform wanted to repurpose an existing handle for something else.
-----
Ok onto the wall of text that is answering your question. the TL;DR version of it is: We don't know yet! There seems to be the appearance of fuckery (thats what AJ/FSS/FUAC are claiming) and until the judge can be sure that no fuckery took place things are on hold.
-----
Now for the WOT!!! During a bankruptcy, a bankruptcy court main role is to make sure that the maximum is extracted from the assets in a public manner. This is good for the public at large and the creditors of what ever entity is going though the bankruptcy.
It wouldn't be very beneficial to those evolved if a $1 million property was sold for $1 in a closed and opaque way (Well apart from the buyer, who just got a steal).
The judge in this case decided that a number of assets would be sold off in an auction, initially the terms of that auction would be what a avg person would think what an auction is. Parties would get to place bids, and other parties would be able to put in counter bids, rinse and repeat until the price stops going up. This is seen as a fair way to extract the maximum value out of the sale, if someone thinks the current bid is undervalued they are free to place a higher bid.
Now with this sale, there were some caveats, for example having to place deposits down on their bids, allowing the trustee of the bankruptcy to "have a peek at a buyers funds" to make sure they are available and the bidding party isn't just fucking around - nothing wrong there, all this was laid out in the terms of the auction, terms approved by the judge overseeing the case. The problem is that those terms were changed at the last minute without the judges approval to change the auction style to a closed bid system. Parties would submit their best and final offer for the assets they wanted and the trustee would decide which of those bids were the best bid.
(problem is, that some parties only wanted some of the assets if others were included, so if asset A wasn't included in a lot (because party b out bid them on that asset) party A no long wanted the rest of the lot, or valued the lot at a much lower price. aka its fucking complicated. this is the "defence" the trustee gave too the judge as to why they thought that doing closed bids was the best way forward, however they never got that pre-approved by the judge (This didn't make the judge happy).
FUAC lawyers argued that because they were not aware of value of The onions bid, they were not able to offer a counter bid.
The Onion were declared the winner (in a news report before the fillings were made) but the "issue" with the onion's bid is that there is a LOT of credit being used in the bid.
After the bids became public, it turned out that FUAC's bid was for $3.5million. The Onion's bid was for $1.75million, however some of the creditors for the assets said they would forgo any of their claim on the auction proceeds due to them to give other creditors a total of $100,000 more than they would receive under other bids (and with the pending judgement they have, which is going to be very hard to collect on fully anyway because its so large - this could be used to "inflate" the sale price, but still only leave $1.75million in cash for the other creditors - it should also be noted that that judgement being used to back this offer is still under appeal and not yet final).
The problem is the judge also didn't approve of this style of credit before hand either.
Now, the judge does have the final say in who won any auction, but normally there isn't any issues with the process, so its just a matter of "rubber stamping" the order after the sale. With this believe in mind The Onion, now declared winners of the assets started taking control of the assets before the order had been signed by off by the Judge, The Onion claim this was done to prevent any value loss/damage to be done, which you know isn't the worse idea in the world, esp if the party currently "owning" the assets is pretty hostile to the sale, but a protective order could have been filed with the court before the close of the auction requiring this, IIRC this wasn't done. Instead they went in and just started shutting everything down.
The judge was not happy about any of this. The judge ended the hearing saying no body should be happy with the result of this and demanded a halt (well more a pause) to the sale and to have a hearing into what actually went down. After which the judge has the option to say "Do the auction again, and here are the hard line rules of said auction", disqualify The Onions bid and allow it to go to the 2nd best bid by FUAC, or allow the sale to the Onion to proceed. But until then the Onion can't just close everything down and Infowars regained control of the assets until the Judge can have a closer look at what really went down.
The problem is, it feels like its a case of "Bad facts trying to make bad law". Sure I found it very funny to hear that the Onion were buy Infowars, I mean its a pretty expensive joke imo because the value of Infowars in Jones he is the sales man that makes the company money, without him the value of the company quickly goes to zero after the notivey wears off, but turning a blind eye "allegedly fucking around with the process" to fuck over AJ because he is a bad man doesn't sit right with me.
Some of your statements are wildly inaccurate. The trustee’s job is to maximize recovery for creditors, which they did, and the creditors worked with the winning bidder to make this happen. Alex Jones is upset the auction was sealed and they couldn’t attempt to outbid anyone else. “I don’t like the rules.” is not a defense. Legitimate explanation from actual attorneys below.
https://youtu.be/GmDNz7irGgw
> The auction process approved by Lopez did not require Murray to automatically select the bidder that submitted the highest amount, and the trustee could reject the bid that was "contrary to the best interests" of the estate creditors.
> Alex Jones is upset the auction was sealed and they couldn’t attempt to outbid anyone else.
The problem is that the judge himself in the emergency hearing on the matter disagreed that the auction should have been closed.
EDIT: Give me a sec and I'll go pull up the recording where I heard it from. (The section in question on where I heard the court recording, with commentary from actual lawyers, on the matter is 2 hours long, so I gotta find the right timestamp for that part where the judge is not happy at all)
Edit: The start of the segment where they cover the purchase gonna find the exact timestamp of the judge - https://youtu.be/ZqQNBhz9JHM?t=7463
The Judghe acting questions of the trustee - https://youtu.be/ZqQNBhz9JHM?t=10314
Lopez is required to act in the best interest of the creditors, and the creditors can always get a better deal working with The Onion, because their interests are aligned.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/25/g-s1-35848/infowars-alex-jone...
> After next month's hearing, Judge Lopez would have the option to approve the sale, to order a new one or to flip the outcome and award Jones' media company to FUAC.
> But University of Florida Levin College of Law professor Christopher Hampson sees that third option as unlikely. He says the deal from The Onion and the families may be somewhat unusual, but it's not necessarily beyond the trustee's discretion. According to a court order, Murray has the authority to use his "reasonable business judgement" to set, modify and add "procedural rules that are reasonably necessary or advisable" and to select the "highest or otherwise best bid."
> "That is expansive language," Hampson says. "There are lots of totally fair ways of running an auction [and] it's not clear to me that the process was problematic in any way."
If a law professor doesn’t believe the process was deficient, what expertise would you rely on to come to an alternate conclusion?
I'm just going off what the judge in the case is saying in the hearings. The judge was not happy at all with how the auction was done as he had intended for it not to be a closed bid auction (the trustee may have sunk an order past him to kinda allow it)
https://youtu.be/ZqQNBhz9JHM?t=11820 Where the judge asks if he authorized waivers of recoveries and the trustee says the judge didn't. And the judge raises his issue about the lack of transparency in the process - which is the main issue here.
The onion's bid may be the better deal, but because of the sealed bid process the judge wasn't expecting, the bids from other parties could have been more, but its mainly about the lack of transparency in the process that the judge is pissed at.
The judge’s happiness is immaterial (I’m unsure why you’re focused on his emotional response, it doesn’t provide him additional options). What matters is his obligations to the creditors and written instructions to the trustee. Those are facts, both legally and public record (respectively).
If the judge intended a different auction process than what was held, or less expansive language directing the trustee (granting less authority to the trustee), that is their mistake.
And transparency of the process is one of those obligations to the creditors and to the population at large
> The judge’s happiness is immaterial
In an ideal world it would be, but we don't live in such a world. After watching a fair few US trials, pissing off the judge can quickly turn a case that would normally be a winner, into a loser you then have to go though the appeals process to try and fix.
Wow, that's a lot of detail.
Judges get very pissed when people hide shit from them. They also get very pissed when someone blatantly skirts existing law. They could actually face serious jailtime for that. They'll be very lucky if this doesn't backfire extremely hard on them.
Even wilder, a lot of people, mostly the Reddit/Bluesky types (you can imagine), are going to lose their fucking minds off of this.
What a fuckin' year this has been, and we're not even in the last month of it.
Another reason to not have an X account, you don't own your account.
Meta: Why does HN allow pay-walled submissions? What percentage of HN users have a 404media account? Why even allow a post that the vast, vast, majority of HN users can't even read?
I feel like you'd also get more uninformed comments from people that could only read the headline and first paragraph or two, but are missing all the additional context from the rest of the article.
Previously addressed 10 years ago by HN staff:
"Paywalls with workarounds are OK. Discussions about it are off-topic."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38286060
Why worry about it? Either pay for access or don't. Simple.