Beloved humor site and “America’s Finest News Source” The Onion has been sold to San Francisco resident and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson, who says “The Onion is an institution, a national treasure, and we need it.”

The new satire site The Onion actually used to have its own San Francisco print edition from 2005 to 2009, competing with the likes of the SF Weekly and SF Bay Guardian. That print edition died the same death as those two alt-weeklies, but earlier. And The Onion is becoming, in one small way, a San Francisco publication again, as Variety reports that The Onion has been sold to Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson, who just happens to be a San Francisco resident.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.


“The Onion is an institution, a national treasure, and we need it,” Lawson said on Twitter after the deal closed. “But its success is based on something different than most media companies. The Onion has been stifled, along with most of the Internet, by byzantine cookie dialogs, paywalls, bizarro belly fat ads, and clickbait content. And we’ve had enough. The Internet sucks, and it’s time we made it better. It’s time to focus on customers – end users – again.”


He then promptly asked readers to donate $1, linking to an Onion post entitled Give Us $1 Or ‘The Onion’ Disappears Forever.


Lawson is not technically the sole owner of The Onion. The site will now be owned by a parent company called Global Tetrahedron, which is a fake running-joke company that’s long been used as a gag line in Onion articles. The newly-formed real version of Global Tetrahedron bought The Onion from G/O Media, the conglomerate that bought and handled (or mishandled, as many would say) the former Gawker media sites Deadspin, Jezebel, and Lifehacker, all of which they have since sold off.


Former NBC News reporter Ben Collins takes over as The Onion’s new CEO. On Thursday, Collins tweeted, “We’re keeping the entire staff, bringing back The Onion News Network, and share the wealth with staff. Basically, we’re going to let them do whatever they want. Get excited.”

Related: The Onion Suggests San Francisco Should Just Move Out Of San Francisco Already [SFist]

Image via The Onion