alt Hacker News> I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people. Is it reasonable because Alex Jones can afford it (hint: he can't, not even if he wasn't hiding his money)?
If there is one thing courts do not like, it is people thinking they are above the law and defy the courts. Jones was dumb enough to do so multiple times. FAFO.
As for the high monetary amount: that was dealt by a jury, not a judge - the system the US (for whatever long gone reason) still seems to prefer over career professionals. Juries are even worse to piss off, and juries have been known to bring the hammer down on parties showing egregiously bad conduct - see e.g. the McDonald's hot coffee case, which partially ended up being (for the time) pretty expensive because McDonald's claimed utter BS in court that they knew was wrong. Jones' conduct was similar: he kept blathering stuff he knew was untrue and, on top of that, his army of suckers kept terrorizing people with Jones knowing about that and doing not even lip service to rein the suckers in.
I was a juror once for a civil case that lead to some fairly significant harm. It was a very odd experience to have to put a dollar to it at the end. The plaintiff attorney gave us numbers for the damages but the defense at the end just basically said "if you decide against my client, just be reasonable" which means we had to just kind of put a dollar value to everything. Some of it like estimates of labor lost were easy, but having to put a dollar value to the pain of a severe injury wasn't something any of us really felt prepared for.