Yeah, the people bitching about the tax obligation are basically just angry they don’t get to see their stocks grow tax free just because they happen to live somewhere else, and they try to get people on their side by misleading others about the way the US taxes citizens abroad.

A very important point is that the judge can’t just reject the deal and let Alex Jones continue forward. The whole reason why the licensing deal is coming to fruition now (instead of in 2024 when he first lost control, or after all the appeals are exhausted) is because this middle ground became untenable: Alex Jones can’t afford the studio’s rent and the creditors are going to seize all the physical assets if they’re not being actively used to run a profitable business to preserve the status quo.

If the status quo is no longer an option, the court will have to order that SOMEthing happen.

The licensing deal is for more than just the domain. It’s like hundreds of squatter domains, too (including, hilariously, goblinlove dot com), and the trademarks.

And the reason why it’s exactly that amount isn’t about the cost of the domain. It’s that the physical studio’s rent is about $75k/month, and they need to keep that lease active long enough to buy the whole shebang once Alex Jones’ appeals run out.

This is the best article I’ve found, and it’s more recent than the NYT article you’ve posted:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/the-onions-infowars-takeover-follows-complicated-legal-journey

I still find dedicated legal reporting to be better than general reporting. And this is a complicated history touching on a lot of different areas of the law.

But the key fact here is that Alex Jones was allowed to keep control over the business assets while his appeals are pending, but has run out of money and cannot continue running his own business. At that point, the receiver overseeing things (where Alex Jones can run the business but can’t transfer assets out or pay anything not directly related to running the business) saw that things had changed enough that he needed to keep the business assets valuable, and that Alex Jones himself couldn’t.

So this licensing deal is a way to keep the assets valuable: keep paying rent on the studio itself, keep all the broadcasting and recording equipment under one roof, keep all the unexpired contracts.

If Alex Jones can’t come up with a plan to actually pay the rent and keep all the stuff, the court is basically going to have no choice but to agree that there’s no way to keep things as they are while the appeals wind through the system, and a temporary licensing agreement is the best option until the appeals go through.

Most of the reporting doesn’t seem to appreciate that Jones’ prospects of blocking this in the courts is dependent on a practical hurdle, not just a legal one: he can’t afford to keep it. That’s what’s changed since December 2024 when The Onion’s first attempt to buy this stuff was blocked (by another federal bankruptcy court, with a different judge than this state court judge overseeing the receiver).

the legitimate ones that are fully backed

The other commenter was trying to use that chart to tell us that cryptocurrencies are somehow better than fiat currencies as a store of value, despite their wild swings in value in the most stable one that isn’t backed by fiat currency.

But if I told you your money was going to be worth half tomorrow, then half again the next every day for the next 16 weeks… You would think shit… Maybe there is a better way to do this.

Doesn’t that happen to most cryptocurrencies?

I think Sundays is the day when many of his closest advisers take some or all of the day off, so he’s just wandering without the distractions that normally keep him busy.