Satire site the Onion says that it has — after 17 months legal wrangling — successfully landed a deal to let it take over Infowars, the right-wing conspiracy-fueled site run by Alex Jones.
Ben Collins, CEO of the Onion, confirmed to Variety details of the company’s new plan to assume control of Infowars under a deal with Gregory Milligan, who was appointed by a bankruptcy court to manage the Infowars site.
Under the terms of the agreement, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license the infowars.com domain name and associated intellectual property including its name, as first reported by the New York Times. The deal would run for six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
In November 2024, the Onion gleefully revealed its winning bid for Infowars, which was sued into bankruptcy (as was Jones) after the families of victims in the Sandy Hook mass shooting in Connecticut won a judgment in 2022 against Jones in a defamation suit. Jones had repeatedly lied and posited baseless conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook massacre. (During the defamation trial in Texas in 2022, Jones testified that he now believes the Sandy Hook shooting was “100% real.”)
But the following month, a bankruptcy judge in Texas rejected the Onion’s cash bid of $1.75 million to acquire the Infowars assets, saying the auction process lacked clarity and that the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims deserved more money.
Now, under the new deal with the court-appointed administration, the Onion said In the coming weeks (and pending court approval) it will launch a new digital platform and comedy network, led by creative director Tim Heidecker and head of programming Mia DiPasquale. The effort “is designed to create a home for emerging and established comedic voices while expanding The Onion’s role as a modern satire institution,” according to the company.
“A lot of institutions and people gave up on doing the right thing over the last two years. Despite an insane amount of threats and bullshit, we persevered,” Collins said in a statement. “Eight years, almost to the day, after the Sandy Hook parents first filed suit against Alex Jones, they’ll finally get some justice, and even some money. You will get a new home for funny things on the internet, a tote bag with a good logo on it and a great newspaper made by human beings in your real-life mailbox.”
Heidecker, whose credits include “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Adult Swim, commented: “There are a lot of talented people making great work with very little support. This is a chance to build a place for ambitious, specific, internet-native comedy and to make something genuinely new out of a very broken piece of media history.”
The Onion said the plan was developed with the support of Sandy Hook families. “The Sandy Hook families took on Alex Jones to stop him from inflicting the same harm on others. For years, he used his corrupt business platform to torment and harass them for profit,” said Chris Mattel, partner at Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder and attorney for the Sandy Hook families who won a $1.4 billion verdict against Jones and Infowars in Connecticut. “When InfoWars finally goes dark, the machinery of lies that Jones built will become a force for social good, thanks to the families’ courage and The Onion’s vision, persistence and stewardship.”
Alex Jones has not commented on the Onion’s new plan to take over Infowars.
In April 2024, New York-based G/O Media sold The Onion to Jeff Lawson, co-founder and former CEO of Twilio and a longtime fan of the satire site. Lawson hired Lawson, a former NBC News reporter covering disinformation, extremism and the internet, to run the company.
On Monday, The Onion shared a fake message from the fictional CEO of Global Tetrahedron, “Bryce P. Tetraeder.”
“With this new InfoWars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us. It will be like the Manhattan Project, only instead of a bomb, we will be building a website,” Tetraeder’s post said. “The InfoWars of tomorrow will converge into a swirling vortex of content about content, talent acquiring talent, rings of concentric media mergers processing all human artistry into one endlessly digestible slurry. This will be a dank, sunless place, one where panic and capital feed on each other like twins in the womb of a hulking, unknowable monster—a monster known by many names, but which I like to call modern-day America.”
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