No, Elon Musk Isn't Riding To Alex Jones's Rescue

He's evil, but come on.

“Trump and Elon are already investigating the Democrats use of the weaponized DOJ bankruptcy system against Infowars,” Alex Jones tweeted after the latest hearing in his bankruptcy case.

“Alex Jones Returns To Infowars’ Historic Studios After Judge Blocks Sale To The Onion!” he shouted in a LIVE EXCLUSIVE, adding that “the Onion’s owner is facing a JAIL CELL instead of controlling Infowars!”

The technical term for all that is “horseshit.” As we discussed on the show, Judge Christopher Lopez had some questions about the auction where The Onion’s parent company Global Tetrahedron, LLC banded together with the Sandy Hook plaintiffs to buy Alex Jones’s media company Free Speech Systems. But the court did not block the sale at the emergency status conference on November 14 where the runner-up bidder objected to the bidding process. And since the order authorizing the auction granted Chapter 7 bankruptcy trustee Christopher Murray broad discretion to run the proceedings as he saw fit, it seems likely that the deal will eventually go through.

As for that JAIL CELL, Jones’s claims about prosecutors in the Trump administration going after the trustee and perhaps even The Onion’s owner Ben Collins is just arglebargle from Jeff “We’ll Call You If There’s an Oil Spill” Clark, the dingus who tried to take over the DOJ and install Trump in the White House after the 2020 election. That’s a fairy tale cooked up for the rubes. But oddly enough, Jones is almost telling the truth about Elon Musk’s involvement in the case — even as his fanboys (and some liberal commentators) are getting it wrong.

The issue is that Ex-Twitter filed a notice of appearance in the bankruptcy case and requested copies of all pleadings.

Jones treated this as a sign that “the cavalry” was riding to his rescue.

“I want to take a moment to thank Elon Musk for all he’s done, and to specifically point out that he sent his lawyers last Thursday afternoon to Houston in my corporate bankruptcy case, and they have appeared officially in the case and have requested all the data, all the files, and all the information so they can review it and find out for themselves exactly what is going on,” Jones growled in one of his many live broadcasts.

In reality, there is no corporate bankruptcy — that’s why the caption of this case is In re Alex Jones. The company, Free Speech Systems, LLC, got booted out of bankruptcy after Judge Lopez determined that Jones never intended to negotiate with his creditors and come up with a plan to reorganize under Chapter 11.

So now FSS (of which Jones owns 100 percent) is being sold to pay his debts as part of his personal bankruptcy under Chapter 7 liquidation. And Jones is taking advantage of his listeners’ lack of knowledge about bankruptcy proceedings to pretend that Musk is coming to bail him out, blustering that “I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this.”

Elon Is Not Going To Be Very Involved In This

X Corp.’s Notice of Appearance concerns one very narrow issue, and even Alex Jones knows it.

In ordinary civil litigation, only the named plaintiff or defendant are “parties” to the case. Anyone else has to move to intervene under Rule 24 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, demonstrating that they have a legal interest that is not adequately represented by the existing parties.

In bankruptcy, the presumption is reversed. Lots of people are likely to be affected by the court’s decisions, including third parties who are not formal creditors, and so permissive inclusion is the rule. Take for example a debtor in bankruptcy who wants to void a lease on an apartment. The landlord will be listed as a creditor, but the next potential tenant will not be, despite having a strong interest in the outcome. And so Section 1109(b) of the Bankruptcy Code allows any “party in interest” to enter an appearance and be heard.

And that is what X Corp. did.

The liberal news outlet Mother Jones and NBC News both trumpeted Ex-Twitter’s entrance of appearance, prompting widespread speculation that Elon Musk would do something to interfere with the sale. But Jones described the issue accurately … well, accurately-ish.

Now people have asked me “why did Elon do that?” And I know the answer. It’s because it’s in his own self-interest in X not to allow them to do what they’ve been trying to do the last few months in my case. They have literally claimed in federal filings — the Democrats, using these plaintiffs as their front group — that they own the name Alex Jones. That they own the name “Real Alex Jones” on X. They actually put in the filing that the Thirteenth Amendment does not apply to Alex Jones. The Amendment outlawing slavery and indentured servitude. Because all of the federal cases have said, somebody can be bankrupt, somebody can be a criminal, somebody can be on death row, but you can’t take their name and their likeness without their permission and paying them because that’s slavery. Well, they are literally trying to overturn not just your property rights, but your right to your name.

None of that law-sounding stuff is real. The motion to sell Alex Jones’s Ex-Twitter handle was filed by the bankruptcy trustee, Christopher Murray, and not by Democrats, the Sandy Hook plaintiffs, the Illuminati, or anyone else. Murray’s argument is that Jones’s social media accounts, including the @RealAlexJones Ex-Twitter handle, are either corporate assets of FSS, or personal property that can be seized and sold. In support, he cited holdings from other bankruptcy courts, including in the Southern District of Texas, treating social media accounts as property of a debtor’s estate and ordering them to be sold for the benefit of creditors.

Murray’s motion does not mention the Thirteenth Amendment (“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”), and neither does the objection filed by Jones himself.

In other words, in actual court, even Alex Jones knows better than to whine about slavery in a dispute over his Ex-Twitter handle. Instead, Jones argued that he has a personal liberty interest in the accounts that bear his name, which is not an inherently preposterous argument.

Ex-Twitter doesn’t give a damn about the disposition of InfoWars. But the company does care deeply about its own intellectual property, and that’s why it’s here. Of course, Alex Jones is gonna Alex Jones.

“I want to thank @elonmusk for joining my legal case defending against the Democrat run deep states attack on free speech and privet [sic] property,” he tweeted. “They are literally claiming in court they own my identity and are trying to set a precedent to take anyone’s identity they desire.”

What the bankruptcy court will decide

The court has not yet ruled on this issue, but Ex-Twitter would very much like to avoid a high-profile ruling (even one of limited precedence) saying that social media handles can be seized and sold.

Oddly enough, the company’s revised Terms of Service do not explicitly bar the sale of handles. Instead, the TOS distinguishes between “content,” defined as “any information, text, links, graphics, photos, audio, videos, or other materials or arrangements of materials uploaded, downloaded or appearing” on the platform, and “services,” which encompasses the right to use the platform itself. The TOS explicitly says that users own their content (and agree to license it to the company). But the right to log in and post content is characterized as a revocable license to “services” that “cannot be assigned, gifted, sold, shared or transferred in any other manner to any other individual or entity without X’s express written consent.”

In other words, users can sell their content even if they’ve uploaded it to the platform (say, by turning it into a book). But they may not sell their license to use the services (say, by conveying their handle to a banned user). And the only thing that Ex-Twitter cares about here is whether the @RealAlexJones account itself and/or the content within it (such as direct messages) can be sold off to pay Jones’s debts.

Which is exactly what Ex-Twitter’s lawyer Jonathan Weichselbaum said at the status conference last week, stating that he was appearing to preserve the company’s “rights to object to the sale of the @RealAlexJones account,” and noting that the issue was not presently ripe. (And it’s why Latham & Watkins sent an associate to the hearing, and not Caroline Reckler, the partner at the top of the signature block.)

A victory for Elon Musk WILL NOT block the sale of InfoWars to the Onion

Social media accounts are routinely transferred by courts, including both in bankruptcy and in private settlements. We are aware of no other case in which X Corp. has sought to intervene over the proposed transfer of a Twitter handle. That doesn’t mean the company is legally prohibited from doing so here, but it will likely inform how Judge Lopez views X Corp’s legal interests under the Terms of Service. If it hasn’t tried to stop transfers in the past, even in this particular courthouse, one might infer that its current stance is more of a political stunt than a legal argument. We shall see.

But even if the court rules that X can veto the transfer of a Twitter handle in bankruptcy, that won’t invalidate the sale of Free Speech Systems. It will just mean at The Onion doesn't get control of Jones’s social media accounts.

Musk is a vile cancer on modern society. But he’s not buying Infowars to bail out a walking shitpost.

Sorry, Alex, he’s just not that into you.