The Onion says it has a new deal to buy Alex Jones’s Infowars

The Onion said it has struck a new deal to take over Alex Jones’s Infowars, a move that would hand one of the country’s most notorious conspiracy platforms to a satirical outlet and test whether bankruptcy can deliver both accountability and reinvention.

The proposed transfer grew out of the bankruptcy proceedings for Jones and Free Speech Systems, which began in 2022 after Jones falsely claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax. Sandy Hook families backed The Onion’s bid, seeing the auction as part of a long fight to force Jones to answer for the falsehoods that followed the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

On November 14, 2024, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, was announced as the winning bidder in the court-supervised auction for Infowars assets. The company said its plan was to strip away the site’s relentless barrage of disinformation and rebuild it as parody, with Everytown for Gun Safety named as the exclusive launch advertiser under a multi-year agreement.

The deal immediately ran into legal resistance. On December 10, 2024, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez rejected The Onion’s bid, saying the auction process was unfair and not transparent and that the winning offer was not the best one. A rival bidder tied to Jones’s business challenged the result, while Jones continued to argue that his media operation should not be taken over.

The dispute sits inside one of the most consequential defamation battles in recent memory. A Connecticut jury verdict against Jones and related entities totaled $1.4 billion, one of the largest judgments ever tied to false claims about a mass shooting hoax. A separate 2022 jury award added $50 million for parents of a Sandy Hook victim, sharpening the pressure on Jones and his businesses as the bankruptcy process moved forward.

The result has turned Infowars into more than a financial asset. For Jones’s critics and for the families who spent years confronting his lies, the auction offered a rare chance to convert legal damage into practical consequences. If The Onion ultimately gains control, the sale would stand as a strange but potent symbol: a platform built on conspiracy could be repurposed into a public rebuke of the same machinery that helped spread those claims.