The Onion Buys Alex Jones’s Infowars Out of Bankruptcy

Media|The Onion Says It Has Bought Infowars, Alex Jones’s Site, Out of Bankruptcy

The Onion, a satirical publication that skewers newsmakers and current events, said on Thursday that it had won a bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars, a website founded and operated by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems.

Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit dedicated to ending gun violence that was founded in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, will sponsor a relaunched version of the site under The Onion.

Family members of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six educators, sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut Superior Court in 2018 after he spread the baseless claim that the rampage was a fabricated pretext for confiscating Americans’ firearms.

The Onion declined to disclose the price it paid for Infowars and its assets, including its production studio and diet supplement business. Mr. Jones could not immediately be reached for comment, but he said on the social media platform X this week that he planned to continue producing his online program, “The Alex Jones Show,” until he was forced to stop.

In September, a Houston judge ruled that Infowars and other assets owned by Free Speech Systems could be auctioned off in bankruptcy to compensate Mr. Jones’s creditors, which include the families of the Sandy Hook victims. Mr. Jones declared bankruptcy in 2022 as the Sandy Hook case made its way to court.