They could have directed hackers to break into Gawker’s email servers. Given the resources he had to draw on, the limitlessness of the options is nearly true: They could have bribed employees at Gawker to leak information, or hired operatives to ruin the company from the inside. A says, musing on all the theoretical angles of attack they brainstormed in meetings at Thiel’s house and in late-night phone calls. “‘It’s almost limitless what one could do,’ Mr. The 319-page book includes this passage written by Holiday: A team could have attempted to bug the Gawker offices.” “Someone could have followed Nick Denton and, while he dined at Balthazar one morning, stolen his cell phone.
A,” whom Thiel, Holiday reports, paid handsomely (a reported $25,000 a month) to help plan and execute Gawker’s death-by-lawsuit. The generally press-averse Thiel cooperated extensively with Holiday, granting the author multiple on-the-record interviews and introducing him to a foreign-born young man identified only as “Mr. That’s where you just become that which you hate.” “But I think those would have ultimately been self-defeating. Retributive justice,” Thiel is quoted in New York Observer media and tech columnist Ryan Holiday’s soon-to-be-published Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue. “There are things that were very tempting, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
Gawker media plus#
That Valleywag article, headlined “Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People,” plus what Thiel later described as a series of Gawker and Valleywag stories about friends and business associates that “ruined people’s lives for no reason” and “bull people even when there was no connection with the public interest,” ultimately prompted him to act.Īlthough Thiel claimed to The New York Times that “it’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” his remarks as quoted in the book suggest revenge played a role.
It is therefore at best inconvenient that’s he’s portrayed in a new book as having considered bribery, theft, bugging, and email hacking, among other potential crimes in 2011, before deciding to engage in a “totally legal” strategy of secretly bankrolling lawsuits against Denton’s company by way of payback for an unwelcome December 2007 report in the defunct Gawker site Valleywag that Thiel is gay. Thiel is presently embroiled in a legal battle in New York Bankruptcy Court concerning his role in Gawker’s demise. government uncover terrorist plots and fraud, a co-founder of PayPal and various flourishing investment funds, and a ground-floor investor in Facebook, where he still sits on the board of directors. With a net worth, per Forbes, of over $2 billion, Thiel is the largest stakeholder in Palantir, an analytical-software company that helps the U.S. The German-born, Donald Trump-supporting (with a $1.25 million campaign donation) Thiel is among the planet’s more successful tech entrepreneurs. I have more to lose than to gain by putting my name on this.Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel-who secretly schemed to annihilate Gawker Media, a goal he achieved in August 2016, and to force its founder, Nick Denton, into personal bankruptcy-may yet have cause to regret that he has reveled so publicly in his vengeful triumph. A single email from any of these guys could torpedo my next round of funding. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, 1 unfollowed me after I tweeted in support of Gawker.
Gawker media how to#
They have funded or built massive institutions of social change without much scrutiny, and now that the scrutiny is coming they don’t know how to handle it. And I want to make it clear that many of those I know in Silicon Valley are thoughtful, intelligent, interesting people. Now, let me say that I am hesitant to even write this dissenting view. The next Gawker will be decentralized and it may follow the Wikileaks model or even publish on the dark web. This is a terrible outcome for freedom of the press, for society, and, I argue, for Silicon Valley, which may have just ensured that the next Gawker operates in the shadows, where tech billionaires can never sue it. Although the case is unresolved, it was enough to bleed and bankrupt the company. Peter Thiel, who sits on the Facebook board and is a Donald Trump delegate, took it down in a proxy lawsuit.
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