Alex Jones, the Infowars far-right conspiracy figure who has been ordered to pay a staggering $1.5 billion to families of Sandy Hook victims over his lies about the deadly massacre, would receive a $520,000 yearly salary under a proposed bankruptcy plan his company submitted this week.
Jones’ Free Speech Systems, which is the parent company of online outlet Infowars, filed a Chapter 11 reorganization plan Tuesday with a bankruptcy court in Texas. Under the proposal, which requires court approval, Jones’ company expects it would have $7 million to $10 million per year after expenses to pay creditors, including the Sandy Hook families.
The AP reported that the filing shows Jones and an “expected new chief operating officer” would each be paid $520,000 per year; in addition, Free Speech Systems would pay between $560,000 and nearly $1.3 million per year in executive incentives and another $352,000-$677,000 in annual employee bonuses. Jones’ company expects to sell more than $30 million per in dietary supplements, per the AP.
Jones has said he plans to appeal the massive monetary damages that a Connecticut jury ordered him to pay, after the conspiracy-monger was sued for defamation by several of the families of Sandy Hook victims. “Do these people actually think they’re getting any of this money?” Jones said on his Infowars show last October after the jury verdict was read. Previously, Jones had claimed the December 2012 shooting in Connecticut — in which 20 children and six adults were killed — was a “giant hoax” perpetrated by “crisis actors,” and that “no one died” in the massacre. He falsely accused the parents of Sandy Hook victims of colluding with the U.S. government in an imagined plot to curtail gun rights.
Last July, Free Speech Systems, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, revealing that the owners of Infowars had taken out more than $62 million from the business.
Jones, who is 49, is “almost certainly the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2018, YouTube, Facebook, Spotify and Apple Podcasts banned Jones and Infowars from their platforms, citing violations of their hate-speech policies.
