I watched opening statement and the plaintiff attorney is solid. According to him, Jones realized that the real money to be made was in grifting the rubes who listen to his show. The best way to that was from selling supplements and pepper gear. However, you can only get so much blood from a poor, uneducated turnip. Thus he needed new listeners to grift and the best way to do this was by saying the most outrageous things possible.
His original coverage of Sandy Hook called it a tragedy. The reception to that coverage was pretty meh. Then he turned it into a gun grab by Obama. That picked up steam. So he kept pushing it and went into full hoax mode. That went viral and he talked about it for the next 5 years. He continued to talk about crises actors, no dead kids, parents were liars, the school wasn't even open at the time of the incident and the whole thing was staged.
He was still talking about hit in 2017 when no other media outlet was covering it.