To quote the Onion themselves:

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.

Because novelty is all it has. As soon as it stops improving in a way that makes people say “oh that’s neat”, it has to stand on the practical merits of its capabilities, which is, well, not much.

We could have had that. Now, we might not even have an FTC.

Strictly speaking, the energy it consumes is the gravitational potential energy of the ore they’re mining, which would be consumed anyway in the form of, well, gravity, acting on the ore on the way down. They’re just using it productively instead of dissipating it as heat from the brakes. Using only energy that ordinarily would have been wasted is of course very neat, but it’s not breaking any laws of physics.

Not too long ago, this would be a career-ending display of corruption.