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

by Ryan Holiday

where was Heather Dietrick in all this? Wasn’t she supposed to be part of the adult supervision—not one of the untrained puppies but a leader? In 2013 she had joined Gawker as its chief counsel. She hadn’t been there when the article was published. Since 2014 she had been the company’s president. Yet she has not convinced her boss, or her coworkers, that this lawsuit is unlike the other cases they have faced, that Hogan is going to go all the way. (She had been told this directly, after all.) Or perhaps she has fallen in with the hard-line faction, too—leaving Nick without the perspective and the advice he so desperately needed. Still united in principle, in common cause against an evil enemy, Peter’s side is not without its problems. It, too, could have been torn apart by its own contradictions and systemic issues. Rich donors are notoriously easy marks. They fund boondoggles as often as they fund the efficient, ruthless machines that people fear are running the world. It’s a real-life luxury tax. Limitless resources are corruptive. They make people lazy. Take Mr. A. In 2011, Thiel’s net worth was roughly $1.5 billion, and conservatively the interest on a billion dollars is hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. Having hooked Peter’s interest in the project, finagling himself into a role as the man on the ground, essentially anything he could have asked for would have been his, had he run back the playbook he used in Berlin. Instead of asking to be paid from the beginnin...