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Friday was a day of reckoning for Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and a long-awaited culmination for the Sandy Hook families who sued Jones for defamation. A federal bankruptcy judge in Texas has decided that Jones must sell off his personal assets through a Chapter 7 liquidation in order to pay families nearly $1.5 billion in damages for spreading lies that the 2012 school shooting never happened.
A trustee was appointed Friday afternoon to take over control of Jones’ personal estate. Liquidation means Jones' personal belongings — from his gun collection to his jewelry — will be auctioned to the highest bidder in something of a fire sale. He could even lose access to his account on X, where he currently has 2.3 million followers. However, Texas law allows him to keep his home, which is worth more than $2 million.
But the judge denied the request by some families to also put Jones’s company in the hands of a Chapter 7 trustee. The company, Free Speech Systems, which produces Jones’s Infowars show, filed for bankruptcy separately from Jones. Some families argued converting the FSS case to a Chapter 7 liquidation would ensure a more orderly and equitable distribution of proceeds from a sale of the company. But other families wanted the FSS case dismissed, arguing that would result in more money, more quickly. Dismissal is also what Jones wanted.