Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

by Ryan Holiday

Thus, Thiel’s vague idea to do something about Gawker is concretized into conspiracy on April 6, 2011. It began unremarkably, when Thiel traveled to Germany to speak at a conference and had dinner with a student he’d met on a tour of a university a few years before. Peter arrives, driven in a black S-class Mercedes, the same model he has idling outside with a driver, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, wherever he is in the world. From the hotel emerges a short, fit young man of indiscernible origin. Aside from his Ivy League education, the young man has at this point achieved next to nothing. But Peter attracts these types—mostly men early in their potentially ascendant careers—and puts them to good use: investing in them, giving them advice, placing them in start-ups, assigning them important roles in his operations. This specific young man in Berlin we shall refer to as Mr. A, the pseudonym that almost everyone involved in the conspiracy refers to him by.