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

by Ryan Holiday

“The truest way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others” is La Rochefoucauld’s maxim. To Gawker these pleas of financial hardship from Hogan must have read as confirmation of the edge they believed they had—their money, their brinkmanship would be the determining factor. Because it was what they were doing. They wanted to hear his complaints, that he was hurting from it. They were so overconfident, so sure that this suit would come to nothing that they could not even conceive of a scenario in which Harder might have an advantage over them, or might be doing something other than being stupid. And who in their right mind so believes in transparency that they would correct their overconfident opponent’s fatal miscalculation? Yet let us not confuse the need for secrecy with a blanket justification of any type of behavior. The conspirators remained committed and seem to have observed their self-imposed limitation of legal behavior—perhaps out of moral goodness or perhaps simply because they wanted a clean victory. There were plenty of illicit or untoward things they could have done secretly, but to what end? At what cost? “I think there’s always this question,” Thiel would say. “I do think you always want to think about, you know, when this ultimately comes out. Is it defensible? And I think all the things that we did were defensible. And so secrets aren’t necessarily forever. You have to live with it coming out at the end.”