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

by Ryan Holiday

Machiavelli writes that a conspiracy without any coconspirators is not a conspiracy. It’s just a crime. This is also basic legal principle. If you kill someone by yourself, in the heat of the moment, it’s murder. If you meticulously plan it with someone else beforehand, that’s conspiracy. Lee Harvey Oswald almost certainly assassinated John F. Kennedy by himself. What he hoped would happen as a result is unclear. John Wilkes Booth conspired not only to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, but working with Lewis Powell and George Atzerodt also aimed to assassinate Andrew Johnson and William Seward. It was a coordinated attempt by Confederate sympathizers to usurp the United States government. It’s not simply a single crime, but a crazed, desperate effort to turn back the tide of a lost war. In his definitive book on the subject of strategy, Lawrence Freedman writes that “combining with others often constitutes the most strategic move.” By definition, the first move in the act of a conspiracy is the assemblage of allies and operators: your coconspirators. Someone to do your bidding, to work with you, someone you can trust, who agrees with you that there’s a problem, or is willing to be paid to agree with the sentiment that it’s about time someone, somebody did something about this. Each hand doesn’t need to know what the other is doing, but there needs to be more than one set. Thus, Thiel’s vague idea to do something about Gawker is concretized into conspiracy on April 6, 2011. It b...