“A decision was made to eliminate the strategies that would either be illegal or fall into any one of a number of gray areas,” Holiday reports in the book, which quotes Thiel as telling him: “There were all these things that you could be tempted to do and it’s not clear they would work any better. A” with a promise of anonymity, Holiday told The Daily Beast he couldn’t confirm or deny the accuracy of BuzzFeed’s scoop, and D’Souza didn’t respond to a Facebook message seeking comment. So we decided very early on we would only do things that are totally legal, which is a big limitation.”īecause he interviewed “Mr. “There were all these things that you could be tempted to do and it’s not clear they would work any better. A” as “an Oxford-educated Australian citizen named Aron D’Souza.” On Friday, BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Mac-the same journalist who originally revealed in May 2016, in Forbes, that Thiel had been footing Hulk Hogan’s legal bills to the tune of $10 million- identified “Mr. 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 cellphone.
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: “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.
#PETER THIEL GAWKER 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. 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.
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