Elon Musk is butting his head into the auction of Alex Jones’s InfoWars.
Satirical outlet The Onion purchased InfoWars’ parent company last month for $1.75 million in conjunction with the families of children murdered during the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, to whom Jones lost a $1.5 billion lawsuit for repeatedly claiming that the mass shooting was a hoax.
That sale included InfoWars’ websites, its studio equipment, its dietary supplements, its branding—as well as its heavily trafficked social media accounts.
The deal appeared to be cut-and-dry, but on Monday, Musk alerted the court that he would not accept the ownership transfer of InfoWars’ X accounts. In filings with a Texas bankruptcy court, X argued that the sale violated its terms of service, which prevent the sale of its accounts, writing that the company objects “to any proposed sale or other purported transfer of any account used by Jones or FSS that is maintained on the X platform (‘X’).”
“Elon Musk, hands down, is a hero,” Jones previously said in a video message posted to his account, praising the world’s richest man for lending him a hand in maintaining his connection to the brand.
It is, nonetheless, a stark reversal of how Musk felt about Jones’s social media presence in the wake of his court judgments. In 2022, shortly after Jones lost his lawsuit to the Sandy Hook families, Musk said he wouldn’t allow Jones back on his social media platform, paraphrasing the Bible in his explanation that Jones deserved “no mercy” for using the “deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”
Meanwhile, social media attorneys have been stunned by the intervention, noting that this appears to be the first instance in which a social media company has gotten involved in a legal dispute over account ownership.
“This is the first time I’ve seen a social media platform arguing to a court that no one can transfer ownership during a dispute over who owns an account because they will just switch it off,” Toby Butterfield, a professor of social media law at Columbia University Law School, told CNN.
Jones repeatedly claimed that the 2012 shooting that left 20 first graders and six teachers dead was a front to lure voters toward gun control policies.
In the run-up to the auction last month, Jones had appeared to be under the impression that “good guys” on the right would buy his fringe network, though he did not reveal who they were. Several groups expressed interest in InfoWars assets, including a coalition of liberal and anti-disinformation watchdog groups, according to The Daily Beast, as well as some of Jones’s own supporters, such as Donald Trump ally Roger Stone. The sale, however, has effectively crushed what was arguably Jones’s most successful endeavor while marking the beginning of his descent into irrelevancy.
Jones is currently working to appeal the sale.
