The Onion’s Latest Joke: Taking Over Infowars

What It Covers

The Onion CEO Ben Collins and comedian Tim Heidecker explain how The Onion won a bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars from Alex Jones, converting it into a parody site while directing proceeds to Sandy Hook families who were awarded over $1.4 billion in damages Jones never paid.

Key Questions Answered

• •Bankruptcy auction strategy: When Infowars was listed for sale through bankruptcy proceedings, The Onion identified the opportunity via a Blue Sky post showing a newspaper auction notice. Collins made calls to confirm the IP was purchasable, self-taught the bankruptcy auction process, and submitted a winning bid on November 14, 2024 — nine days after Trump's election complicated the decision.
• •Legal workaround via lease: After an emergency court stay blocked the asset sale, The Onion negotiated directly with the court-appointed receiver to lease Infowars assets instead. Since the stay only prohibited selling, not leasing, the receiver agreed — keeping asset value intact for Sandy Hook families who have received zero dollars across four and a half years since the judgment.
• •Misinformation counter-strategy through parody: Rather than direct rebuttal, The Onion's approach is to expose the mechanics of misinformation — fear-based content paired with supplement sales — by parodying the format itself. The goal is retraining audience associations with the Infowars brand over five years, separating it entirely from Jones and his content model.
• •Sandy Hook family alignment: Collins secured family support by framing the takeover around two goals: financial recovery and preventing Jones from repeating the same harassment against future victims. Families, who have endured a decade of legal battles since filing suit, endorsed the project after initially hesitant responses, with several expressing gratitude rather than simply granting permission.
• •Jones's diminished reach as context: Jones currently draws roughly 6,000 viewers per stream on Rumble — a fraction of his former YouTube audience of millions before his 2018 platform ban. His business model remains supplement sales driven by manufactured fear. The Onion's parody targets this exact structure, not just Jones personally, making it applicable to similar influencer-driven misinformation ecosystems.