Alex Jones’ Legacy for Sale in Bids to Save or Bury Infowars

In the traditionally dry, dollar-and-cents world of bankruptcy liquidations—designed to squeeze what little can be saved from a failed business or estate—politics and ideology rarely enter the equation.

But such ideological considerations are on full display in the bankruptcy sale of Alex Jones’ media platform Infowars. The auction offers a potential prize for Jones’ fans and allies who want to keep him on the air—as well as left-leaning groups looking to “buy and bury” the outlet a means of combating the conspiracies and misinformation that led to his insolvency in the first place.

Trustee Christopher Murray is tasked with liquidating Jones’ estate and that of Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems LLC, to help pay down nearly $1.5 billion in defamation judgments related to statements Jones made calling the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting a hoax.

And as a November bidding deadline approaches, a slew of different interests have started to kick the tires on the Infowars assets.

“There’s a lot of folks who really look at Infowars as a source of truth,” said Nolan Higdon, a professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of “The Anatomy of Fake News.” “It’s one of the few places where they think their narrative or perception of reality is treated as legitimate.”

Interested Buyers

The assets up for sale include production rights and materials, more than 400 domain names, social media accounts, podcast sites, newsletter subscribers, archival library, the e-commerce nutritional supplement business, product trademarks, and production equipment. Initial bids are due Nov. 8.

A winning bidder for the whole company would have the ability to choose whether to keep Infowars’ business and media enterprise going, and to hire or fire key employees—like Jones.

“We have had a large volume of inquiries from a wide range of prospects—ranging from media companies to supplement and other e-commerce businesses, as well as general investor types,” said Jeff Tanenbaum, president and founder of auctioneer ThreeSixty Asset Advisors LLC.

Jeff Rotkoff, publisher of the progressive Texas digital media startup The Barbed Wire, told Bloomberg Law that the company is “absolutely considering making a bid for Infowars.” He launched a website to fundraise for the purchase.

“It would be a step towards justice to use the Infowars brand to undo some of the damage they’ve caused,” Rotkoff said.

Angelo Carusone, president of the left-leaning nonprofit organization Media Matters for America, confirmed that the group is also considering a bid for Infowars. Both Carusone’s and The Barbed Wire’s interests were first reported by Semafor.

Media Matters, which researches and aims to correct conservative misinformation, is interested to see what archives are included in the Infowars materials, Carusone said. There could be unaired portions of interviews, show notes exchanged with producers, and knowledge about Jones’ audience, he said.

“The information there would give us a richer understanding about this universe that would enable Media Matters and others to start to put more arrows in the quiver when it comes to not just debunking this information, but more importantly for how we sort of prebunk it, how we inoculate against it, how we sort of get in front of it,” Carusone said.

Billionaire Texan Mark Cuban said he was contacted about potentially bidding for the assets, he told Bloomberg Law via email. Cuban said he was curious and asked some questions, but didn’t go any further.

“Not interested in bidding at all,” Cuban said.

Jones on X last month said his supporters had a “great idea” for billionaire Elon Musk to buy Infowars and then sell it back to him. Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Right-wing political consultant Roger Stone in September said on X he was putting together an investor group to buy Infowars and hire Jones to run it. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Jones was a pioneer using false information to maximize profits by creating stories that would make people feel like they needed a product that he was also offering, Higdon said.

“I wouldn’t underestimate the power of that brand,” Higdon said.

Brand Power

Murray, the trustee, told the bankruptcy court last month that some bidders have inquired about purchasing Jones’ personal intellectual property as part of a package.

But for now, bids are only being accepted for Infowars’ physical assets, like production equipment, in combination with its IP, according to the auctioneer website.

“It’ll be interesting to see who’s a bigger brand: Infowars or Alex Jones,” Higdon said. “In my estimation, I would wager Jones is probably the bigger brand for good or bad.”

Christopher D. Hampson, a bankruptcy professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, said he suspects the highest cash bids will come from right-wing media organizations that see value in the Infowars brand.

“Someone who wants to ‘buy and bury’ the brand—or turn InfoWars.com into a landing page for truthful information—cannot readily turn the brand into an income stream,” Hampson said. “Someone might still put money on the table to do that, but it’s a fundamentally different kind of value proposition.”

Fans and critics alike may also be interested in buying parts of the Infowars studio for souvenirs, such as microphones or desks.

Governments via third-party proxies—perhaps with hidden ownership—interested in undermining social cohesion in America could be vying for a top spot with investors, said Robert Dover, a professor of intelligence and national security at the University of Hull.

“The utility would be a large quantity of materials that could be repurposed, recut or re-used, and the data analytics underpinning usage, viewer exposure and so on,” Dover said.

Groups with harder-right or libertarian leanings, or even Q-Anon believers, could also be interested, Dover said.

Liability

Wherever the interests lie, a looming issue is whether the successful bidder for the assets might be tagged with what’s called “successor liability,” Hampson said.

While buyers of assets in a bankruptcy generally don’t take on any liabilities, if the buyer simply continues on with business as usual, state law sometimes imposes old liabilities on the successor—which would be the judgments owed to the Sandy Hook families, Hampson said.

The families “have preserved the issue and seem prepared to leverage it against any buyer who wants to empower Jones to stay on the air,” Hampson said. “What we might see is a negotiated resolution of that dispute, where the buyer agrees not to talk about Sandy Hook at all, in exchange for a release of any successor liability argument.”

Jones himself has suggested that he wouldn’t continue at Infowars unless he has the ability to say what he wants.

“If patriots buy it, as a lot of folks say they are, and if they’re the top bidder, then if I like the folks and they don’t curtail my free speech I will work with somebody else,” Jones said in a video he posted on X.