InfoWars-The Onion standoff: Why Musk’s intervention looks so strange

Eccentric billionaire Elon Musk is a classic case of a trouble-seeker who just can’t stay away from controversy.

The latest dispute that Musk appears to be courting these days involves the bankruptcy auction of InfoWars, a right-wing media platform run by controversial US political commentator Alex Jones.

Last week, satirical news website The Onion announced acquiring InfoWars in a court-ordered sale.

Subsequently, Musk-owned social media platform X “entered an appearance” – a legal term expressing the intention to take part in proceedings – asking the federal court that it be included on any future communications about the case.

As a result, a federal bankruptcy judge temporarily halted the transfer of InfoWars to The Onion while ordering an “evidentiary hearing” to review the auction process aimed at ensuring the “process and transparency”.

Judge Christopher Lopez of Texas Southern District warned people against feeling “comfortable with the results of the auction” until the evidentiary hearing takes place next week.

On the one hand, The Onion CEO Ben Collins is insisting that his company has won the bid fair and square and that the only thing pending was “standard processes”. Collins plans to relaunch InfoWars as a “satirised version of itself” in January.

On the other hand, Jones, who is a vocal Trump supporter, has hailed the court’s review order. “The cavalry is here. Trump is pissed,” he said, implying that the president-elect is unhappy with the court-ordered sale of a news platform that has consistently supported the 45th US president.

According to US-based website traffic tracker Semrush, InfoWars generated an average of 13.5 million views in October alone.

What does Musk – the world’s richest man and the X owner – stand to gain from preventing the forced sale of a libel-ridden, bankruptcy-facing media platform founded and operated by the most paranoid man in America to a satirical publication?

It’s crucial to remember that when Musk bought Twitter, the company insiders saw it as a takeover aimed at controlling “the narrative” in times when the US had been deeply polarised on a range of issues. Musk’s takeover eventually worked in favour of Trump. Renaming it X, Musk reversed the Twitter ban on several far-right accounts that peddled disinformation and conspiracy theories.

The court filing, however, stops short of mentioning the objective of X’s appearance. All that the court document says is that X reserves the right to an appearance in the case.

‘Face of monetised suspicion in America’

Jones – the 60-year-old radio host based in Austin, Taxes – is known for spreading over-the-top conspiracy theories for more than three decades.

Son of a dentist father and a stay-at-home mother, Jones grew up in Dallas and moved to Austin when he was a teenager. He started broadcasting on a public-access television channel in the 1990s, creating a name for himself for spewing conspiracy theories.

For example, Jones claimed that US banking, corporate and military interests were behind 9/11 attacks, which were staged to bring about a “centralised globalist government”.

He is also a moon landing denier who also believes the government acted as a guiding hand for the Oklahoma City bombing, the worst act of homegrown terrorism in US history.

Jones’s media empire kept growing over the years despite the outlandish nature of his claims. The Associated Press reported his annual revenues touched $80 million as he cultivated a loyal fanbase through more than 100 radio stations across the US as well as his InfoWars website and social media accounts.

How InfoWars went bankrupt

Jones ran a lean operation until the mid-2000s when he had only two employees and worked out of a tiny office in south Austin.

Bankruptcy documents show he set up a company by the name of Free Speech Systems in 2007 to consolidate his growing business operations.

Jones started selling dietary supplements in 2013 under the same company structure with brand names like InfoWars Life Super Male Vitality.

“Most of (Free Speech Systems’) revenue to this day (about 80 percent) comes from sales of dietary supplements,” according to court records.

However, Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy in 2022. Jones was asked to pay $1.5 billion in damages to the families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims who filed defamation lawsuits over his false claims that the massacre was a “hoax” and that some of the parents were “actors”.

He broadcast the conspiracy theory on his platform, which led to “years of harassment and threats” against the grieving families.

Does Musk have a dog in the fight?

While Jones has been a vocal supporter of president-elect Donald Trump for years, Musk is a relatively recent convert. Once celebrated as a forward-thinking entrepreneur focused on sustainability and innovation, Musk began voicing concerns about what he perceives as growing leftist overreach.

Musk has criticised progressive policies on free speech, government regulations and corporate taxes — issues that put him in alliance with conservative opinion makers like Jones.

Most mainstream social-media companies like Facebook, YouTube and X (then called Twitter) banned Jones and Infowars about five years ago for violating services’ rules. However, Musk restored Jones’s account last year after taking over Twitter and rebranding it as X.

“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Mother Jones magazine quoted the conspiracy theorist as saying after the court’s latest review order halting the transfer of InfoWars to The Onion.

“Elon Musk understands these basic fundamentals that more people need to understand,” Jones said.

When InfoWars’ website temporarily shut down ahead of the anticipated transfer of its ownership, Jones quickly moved his platform to X and started operating under the brand name of Alex Jones Network.

Lawyers representing X and its inexplicable interest in the InfoWars bankruptcy proceedings have not responded to requests for comment by different news publications (here and here).

In a video posted on X, InfoWars host Harrison Smith claimed that “Trump is involved” in the ongoing legal battle for the ownership of the conservative media platform.

He added that Musk’s lawyers have intervened because the transaction would entail the transfer of Jones’s X account.

“So Elon is invested in it because it will set a precedent for using lawfare to force X to sign over their personal accounts.”

A commentator on social media platform Reddit expressed a similar view: “They are objecting to [Jones’s] X account being part of the sale… it belongs to X, not Jones/Infowars. I can see why Twitter [sic] should want to be clear that handles are not the property of anyone but themselves.”