The Onion’s Audacious Plans for Infowars Are Not a Joke 

Owner Jeff Lawson, CEO Ben Collins, and comedian Tim Heidecker tell Inc. how they found themselves owning goblinlove.net and selling gay frog plushies, and what it means for the future of ‘The Onion.’

BY SAM BLUM, SENIOR WRITER @SAMMBLUM

When billionaire Jeff Lawson bought The Onion at auction in 2024, he imagined it would offer an exciting next chapter in his career. Lawson co-founded the cloud computing giant Twilio in 2008 and exited the company in 2024, primed and ready for his next move. He became The Onion’s majority shareholder after purchasing it at auction for an undisclosed amount from G/O Media, after the blog network began to sell off assets to cut losses for its parent company, the private equity firm Great Hill Partners. 

At the time, the Chicago-based Onion, known for chronicling American life with an absurdist lens since its founding in 1988, was on life support. “My thought process was that buying The Onion would be fun,” Lawson tells Inc. “Instead, I looked at the financial story, and I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is not buying The Onion—this is saving The Onion,’ because it was in a death spiral.”

The auction was a delicate situation. The Onion had grown from a culty weekly newspaper born in Madison, Wisconsin, to a household name synonymous with viral headlines that captured the zeitgeist of the first two decades of the new century. Depending upon the winning bidder, the outlet risked disappearing forever or perhaps puttering along listlessly as a content mill for AI-generated jokes. 

When The Onion went up for sale, the site was a husk of its former glory: The user experience was cluttered with programmatic ads, and full-time staff had been whittled down to a little over a dozen writers and editors. A Gen-Xer who cultivated deep affection for The Onion while he was an undergrad at the University of Michigan in the 1990s, Lawson intervened out of a sense of moral obligation. Except there was a slight hiccup: He had no idea how to run a media company.

Ben Collins, a journalist who spent years covering extremism and misinformation for NBC News, was also leading a group trying to buy The Onion. Collins and Lawson didn’t know each other, but their respective expertise made them an ideal pairing. They quickly teamed up at the suggestion of a lawyer working to broker The Onion’s sale on G/O’s behalf. Collins, who publicly tussled online with internet trolls and provocateurs as a reporter, is now the CEO of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron. Under his leadership, the publication has roared back to life, tackling beltway politics, tech industry dystopia, and meddlesome texts from your mom. 

When Lawson acquired the outlet, revenue was barreling toward six figures annually, 70 percent of which was drawn from programmatic ads, Collins says. This year, The Onion is set to become an eight-figure business, largely driven by the resurrection of its print newspaper, which was scuttled by its previous owners in 2013.

 “Our goal for the year is to get to 100,000 subscribers, because that would beat The Washington Post in terms of circulation,” Collins says. “And we’re going to get there.” Currently, The Onion has around 85,000 subscribers, making it one of the five largest newspapers in the country by circulation. Under Collins’s direction, Global Tetrahedron—named after a deep cut from the publication’s 1999 book Our Dumb Century—continues to reinvent distressed media properties in ways that are audacious and seemingly engineered to go viral.  

In November........

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