The Onion, America’s most celebrated satire publication, has struck a deal to take over Alex Jones’ Infowars after 17 months of legal battles – and plans to relaunch the notorious right-wing conspiracy site as a comedy network and parody of everything it once stood for, with the full support of the Sandy Hook families whose years-long legal pursuit of Jones made it possible.
Ben Collins, CEO of the Onion, confirmed details of the deal to Variety. Under the agreement, the Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, will pay $81,000 per month to license the infowars.com domain name and associated intellectual property. The deal runs for six months with an option to renew for a further six months, and must be approved by a judge before it takes effect.
The long road to the deal
The Onion first revealed its winning bankruptcy auction bid for Infowars in November 2024, after Jones and his company filed for bankruptcy amid defamation suits brought by the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut. Those families won judgments in 2022 totalling $1.4 billion against Jones for his years of lies and baseless conspiracy theories about the massacre – including his repeated claims that it was a “hoax” staged by “crisis actors.” The US Supreme Court subsequently rejected Jones’ appeal of the verdicts.
However, a Texas bankruptcy judge rejected the Onion’s initial cash bid of $1.75 million in December 2024, saying the auction process lacked clarity and that the Sandy Hook families deserved more money. The new deal – a licensing arrangement with the court-appointed administrator Gregory Milligan rather than an outright purchase – appears to have resolved those concerns.
What Infowars will become
The Onion says it will launch a new digital platform and comedy network at infowars.com in the coming weeks, pending court approval. The relaunch will be led by creative director Tim Heidecker – known for Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! on Adult Swim – and head of programming Mia DiPasquale.
“There are a lot of talented people making great work with very little support,” Heidecker said. “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 project is described as being “designed to create a home for emerging and established comedic voices while expanding The Onion’s role as a modern satire institution.”
The Sandy Hook families’ role
The deal has been developed with the explicit support of the Sandy Hook families – the people whose suffering Jones exploited for years and whose legal courage ultimately brought his media empire down.
“The Sandy Hook families took on Alex Jones to stop him from inflicting the same harm on others,” said Chris Mattel, attorney for the families. “For years, he used his corrupt business platform to torment and harass them for profit. 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.”
Collins, reflecting on what the deal represents, said: “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. 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.”
The fake CEO statement that says it all
The Onion, being the Onion, marked the announcement with a fake statement from the fictional CEO of Global Tetrahedron, “Bryce P. Tetraeder” – a piece of satire that is, in its way, more honest about the nature of modern media than most actual journalism.
“With this new InfoWars, we will democratize psychological torture, welcoming brutal and sadistic ideas from everyone, even the very stupidest among us,” the statement read. “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.”
It is hard to improve on.
The Onion was purchased by Jeff Lawson, co-founder and former CEO of Twilio, in April 2024. Lawson hired Collins – a former NBC News reporter covering disinformation, extremism and the internet – to lead the company.
Alex Jones hasn’t taken it well…
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