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

by Ryan Holiday

If Thiel is Melville’s Ahab, manically chasing a white whale wherever it takes him, then Denton is Melville’s Benito Cereno, a prisoner on his own ship, unable to communicate the terror of his position, being driven slowly insane by the sound of the sharpening hatchets of his crew. He can’t sell the company with a lawsuit hanging over it, he can’t settle the case without going back on much of his rhetoric to the writers and in the press. He would try to push the writers to be nicer, to ask them when they would be gratuitously mean or reckless, “What’s your purpose here? What are you hoping to do with this post?” He thought he could manage the energy. He tried new editors, wrote long memos, held long meetings about his editorial vision. But the incentives were built into the core of the company. The writers had no stake in the business, only in the notoriety. They were measured in page views, and they knew the best way to get them was to say and do the things that no one else could—or would. And yet Denton also knew that he could not afford for them to be too much nicer anyway. He needed the traffic to show the growth to lure in new investors to pay the legal bills he was now drowning in. He needed to keep the audience entertained, too. They were fickle, they did not appreciate his predicament. They have their own problems, and don’t care about his.