Judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion, Alex Jones says
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(NEW YORK) — A bankruptcy judge rejected the sale of Infowars to The Onion, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said during his podcast on Tuesday.
“We are deeply disappointed in today’s decision but The Onion will continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured,” The Onion CEO Ben Collins said on social media.
“We will also continue to seek a path towards purchasing InfoWars in the coming weeks,” Collins’ statement continued.
Jones accused The Onion and Sandy Hook Elementary School families of “collusive bidding” and asked a bankruptcy court judge to halt the sale of his Infowars platform in November.
Jones, who defamed the Sandy Hook families by calling the 2012 massacre a hoax and the parents of the 20 first graders actors, called The Onion’s winning $1.75 million bid “sheer nonsense” because it’s half of what the losing bidder offered.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — Shares of Netflix soared 12% in early trading on Wednesday, just hours after the streaming giant announced price increases set to impact all of the company’s U.S. subscribers.
The standard monthly subscription without advertisements will climb from $15.49 to $17.99, and a standard monthly subscription with ads will increase one dollar to $7.99, Netflix said.
The price hikes arrived alongside a stellar earnings report that showed the largest subscriber gains over a three-month period since the company’s founding more than a quarter-century ago.
Netflix added 19 million subscribers over the last quarter of 2024, vaulting the company to 302 million subscribers worldwide. Revenue jumped 16% over the final three months of 2024 compared to a year earlier, topping $10 billion in a single quarter for the first time.
“As we continue to invest in programming and deliver more value for our members, we will occasionally ask our members to pay a little more so that we can re-invest to further improve Netflix,” Netflix said in a letter to investors.
The second season of hit show “Squid Game” helped propel the subscriber bounce, Netflix said, noting that the series is on pace to be the most-watched season of original programming in the company’s history.
Netflix also found success in the latter part of 2024 with the holiday movie “Carry On” and a live boxing match between influencer Jake Paul and former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, the company said.
“It’s great that all these big swings worked very well in the quarter,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said on a conference call with investors on Tuesday.
The price hikes at Netflix follow a string of price jumps imposed by competitors last year.
In August, Disney announced price increases for streaming services Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ that amounted to hikes of between $1 or $2 for each platform. Two months earlier, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max increased prices for its ad-free membership by $1 per month. (Disney is the parent company of ABC News.)
Stock analysts lauded Netflix in memos to clients on Wednesday.
In a note shared with ABC News, Bank of America Global Research described the earnings report as “very strong.”
Tigress Financial, a New York City-based advisory firm, said Netflix’s performance foretells further increases in the company’s share price.
“The incredible power of its subscriber growth and subscriber base will continue to drive further gains in the stock,” Tigress Financial wrote in a letter shared with ABC News.
Netflix led all studios with 36 nominations for the Golden Globes, which took place earlier this month. “Emilia Pérez,” a film starring Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, won four awards, including best motion picture – musical or comedy.
Speaking to investors on Tuesday, Sarandos said the wildfires in Los Angeles would not delay the company’s releases this year or reduce anticipated revenue.
“No meaningful delays in the delivery of the projects and no meaningful impact to the cash in 2025, but very meaningful disruption in people’s lives,” Sarandos said.
“So, our goal is to keep everything on schedule safely, be mindful of folks who need time to work through the challenges of the fires, including, in some cases, loss of life and home. But this industry has been through a really tough couple of years, starting with COVID, going into the strikes, and now this,” Sarandos added.
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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Thursday said he will call for a lowering of U.S. interest rates, exerting pressure on the Federal Reserve despite a longstanding norm of political independence at the central bank.
During a virtual address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump demanded a drop in interest rates after calling for a reduction of oil prices set by a group of nations known as OPEC, which includes Saudi Arabia.
The prospect of low oil prices will enable the Fed to dial back its fight against inflation and bring down interest rates, Trump said.
“I’m going to ask Saudi Arabia and OPEC to bring down the cost of oil,” Trump said, later adding: “With oil prices going down, I’ll demand that interest rates drop immediately.”
The U.S. does not belong to OPEC, nor does the president play a role in the organization’s decisions regarding the price of oil sold by its member states.
The central bank is typically insulated from political interference, but several past presidents have sought to influence the Fed’s interest rate policy, including Trump, who repeatedly spoke out in favor of low interest rates during his first term.
On the campaign trail in August, Trump said a U.S. president should have a role in setting interest rates.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell struck a defiant tone in November when posed with the question of whether he would resign from his position if asked by Trump.
“No,” Powell told reporters assembled at a press conference in Washington, D.C., blocks away from the White House.
When asked whether Trump could fire or demote him, Powell retorted: “Not permitted under the law.”
The prospect of a presidential role in setting interest rates drew opposition from both liberal and conservative economists who previously spoke to ABC News.
Critics of an expanded role for the president point to a bout of high inflation in the 1970s and 1980s. Before the inflation took hold, President Richard Nixon had urged Fed Chair Arthur Burns to cut rates in the run-up to the 1972 presidential election.
Nixon’s advocacy is widely viewed as a contributing factor for lower-than-necessary interest rates that enabled inflation to get out of control, some economists noted.
“Allowing the president, any president, to help set monetary policy would eventually wreck the U.S. economy,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told ABC News.
The statements from Trump on Thursday came amid a monthslong reduction in interest rates.
The Fed cut interest rates by a total of a percentage point over the final months of 2024, delivering relief for borrowers long-saddled by a prolonged stretch of high interest rates.
The central bank, however, has indicated that it may cut rates less often in 2025 than it previously indicated. Inflation may prove more difficult to bring under control than policymakers thought just a few months ago, according to the bank.
The Fed is set to make its next decision on interest rates next week. The central bank is widely expected to maintain interest rates at the current level of between 4.25% and 4.5%, according to the CME FedWatch Tool, a measure of market sentiment.
Speaking on Thursday, Trump said a lowering of rates could bring about a reduction of interest rates worldwide.
“They should drop all over the world,” Trump said. “They should follow us.”
(NEW YORK) — Facebook plans to replace its fact-checkers with “community notes,” a move that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would allow the social network to return “to our roots around free expression.”
“We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes,” Zuckerberg said on Tuesday. “Looking forward to this next chapter.”
The changes, which will also be in place for Instagram and Threads, will lift restrictions “on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse” and will focus the company’s “enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” Joel Kaplan, chief global affairs officer, said in a blog post.
Meta executives sought in their statements to tie the update to what they described as a sea change in public discourse accompanying the rise of President-elect Donald Trump’s brand of politics.
Fact-checkers who were put in place in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election have proven to be “too politically biased” and have destroyed “more trust than they’ve created,” particularly in the United States, Zuckerberg said.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said.
The decision also follows Zuckerberg recent meeting with Trump at the president-elect’s private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. And Meta is donating to Trump’s presidential inaugural committee, marking a first for the company.
The shift in policy mirrors a series of updates that Elon Musk — a Trump ally — made after purchasing rival social network Twitter, which he’s since rebranded as X.
Kaplan on Tuesday praised the approach Musk has taken, saying X under its new owner has empowered its “community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context.”
“We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing — and one that’s less prone to bias,” Kaplan said.
As the company’s fact-checking capabilities have grown, they have expanded “to the point where we are making too many mistakes,” which in turn has frustrated many of the social networks’ users, Kaplan said.
“Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do,” he said.
ABC News’ Michael Kreisel, Zunaira Zaki and Chris Donovan contributed to this report.
