Do they though? Put up that portion of the debt owed to them by the estate, which should be valued in at least that amount.

Did you read the article? That's exactly what they did.

Did you read the article? Jones was arguing that the families shouldn't be able to do that but the article doesn't say anything about whether he won that argument and the only reason it specifies for why the judge rejected the sale is this:

> Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret.

Which implies they might just be able to redo the auction without secret bids and get the same result.

Hence the if

Once secret bids are known, and the auction is conducted again, usually the party with the biggest pockets then just wades in and takes it.

Once the price is known, several parties tend to walk away.

> Once the price is known, several parties tend to walk away.

This is why you disclose the current winning bid, which will be <minimum bid increment> over the second highest current bid. If that's already more than you're willing to pay then you weren't going to win anyway. If it isn't, you can put in your bid and then the previous winning bidder has to outbid you again. Which they might do, but you don't know that and until the bid is above what you're willing to pay you don't lose anything by placing bids which as far as you know might actually win.