A company that created cryptocurrency to support the election of President Donald Trump is now selling a meme coin in the hopes of buying Alex Jones’ conspiracy news broadcast platform Infowars, which was bankrupted by Sandy Hook families Jones defamed.
The goal of the Puerto Rico-based entertainment company WOW.AI, if the bid is successful, is “to let token holders decide what the future holds for the (Infowars) website.”
By “token holders,” the company is referring to those who buy a newly issued a $100 meme coin called $WARS, who would have the opportunity to “vote on what should happen with Infowars” if the WOW.AI bid wins. A meme coin is a valueless type of cryptocurrency that feeds off a social media trend in the hope of gaining value as its popularity increases.
Whether the federal judge overseeing Jones’ marathon bankruptcy case would entertain a noncash offer for Infowars remains to be seen. The same judge in December threw out a joint bid by the satirical news site, the Onion, and a group of Sandy Hook families in part because that bid contained a noncash offer.
“As a bidder interested in the (Infowars) assets, WOW supports a transparent and straightforward sale process pursuant to established protocols,” says a two-page request filed Wednesday by WOW lawyers in federal bankruptcy court in Houston.
There is no mention of WOW’s offer in the filing, but in a statement WOW CEO Rick Latona said, “The offer includes $3.5 million in cash, plus additional consideration in the form of 51% of the total maximum supply of the $WARS meme coin.”
The WOW offer follows an appeal to federal bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez by a Jones-affiliated company to restart the derailed Infowars auction. That company said it had made an $8 million cash offer for Infowars that had been ignored by the federal trustee put in charge of liquidating Jones’ estate. Last week, the judge denied the request by First United American Companies for an emergency hearing to launch a new Infowars sale.
“WOW respectfully requests that this court permit the trustee or other appropriate party to seek approval of a process that includes appropriate and transparent protocols for the sale of the (Infowars) assets, consistent with the wind-down order,” WOW’s petition from Wednesday says.
Since Lopez threw out the sale of Infowars in December, there has been no progress toward liquidating Jones’ personal and professional estates to pay the Sandy Hook families he defamed a token of the $1.4 billion he owes them. In early February, the judge struck down a deal that would have settled how $16 million in Jones’ assets were distributed to a group of Sandy Hook families who sued Jones in Texas and a larger group of Sandy Hook families who sued Jones in Connecticut.
The slowdown in the bankruptcy case is in part because lawyers for Jones have appealed to the Connecticut Supreme Court to rule on what Jones has called abuses of his First Amendment rights during the 2022 defamation awards trial in Waterbury. Jones called the 2012 massacre of 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax” and “completely fake with actors.”
Meanwhile WOW has been trying to capitalize on the headlines to “get into the game.”
“You may be coming here for the first time because you’ve seen one of our first two projects about Trump and Infowars. Please don’t think that means that we are a political site,” says a note to prospective meme coin buyers entitled, “Everything doesn’t always have to be so serious. Can we please try to have fun along the way?”
“We launched TRUMP.ai just before the inauguration and WARS.ai recently because we needed to take action to get into the game and try to win the auction,” the note says.
And what happens should WOW be allowed to bid and WOW wins?
“One thing we can tell you is that, in the unlikely event that we are fortunate enough to win the assets, once they are received, we will solicit offers for a period of 90 days from third parties interested in running the site,” WOW says to prospective buyers. “(We will) then put it up for a vote to allow $WARS token holders to decide which offer to accept.”
