alt Hacker NewsBear in mind buying it to ruin it is a very real public service. Alex Jones was hoping a conservative ally would buy it and then just continue to let him do what he wants.
Jokes aside, The Onion is basically spending a giant pile of money to burn the website down.
I remember when The KLF burned a million quid. They were being internally consistent. It was artistically relevant.
Most people thought they were insane. Bill Drummond wrote about how it strained his relationship with his kids. You can tell that he regrets it.
Personally I think a million bucks to lease a domain name for a year is a really terrible business decision. You might be able to argue that it's going to victims but you could almost certainly just park that money into an interest-bearing account and do better for those victims.
But it's also been obvious from the beginning (starting with Jones' own comments) that nobody really gives a shit about these families and they're just props in other peoples' theater show.