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

by Ryan Holiday

ancient Rome, slaves who revealed conspiracies were often given their freedom in exchange. The conspiracy against Nero collapsed when a plotter named Scaevinus asked his servant to sharpen his dagger and hosted a generous dinner where he gave away most of his fortune. The servant took news of this strange behavior to the emperor. An insider to the Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James I would write an anonymous letter that exposed Guy Fawkes’s involvement in 1605 and earned Fawkes a one-way trip to the gallows. François Picaud, the man who inspired the story that became The Count of Monte Cristo, found his revenge plot partly thwarted when he was betrayed by a collaborator who attempted to blackmail him. In the end, this blackmailer murders Picaud himself and relays the whole story on his own deathbed a few decades later, turning the most famous revenge plot in the history of literature into a meta-warning to every would-be conspirator today: beware your allies.