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

by Ryan Holiday

On May 24, 2016, Forbes wins the race: “This Silicon Valley Billionaire Has Been Secretly Funding Hulk Hogan’s Lawsuits Against Gawker.” One of Denton’s classic slogans—today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news. Two days after the Forbes piece runs, Thiel himself confesses to the Times. The controversy is immediate and immense. For the first time, coverage of the most media-centric story of the year is no longer tinged with amusement about the lurid details of a celebrity’s private life or whether sex tapes were newsworthy, but rather with anger and rage and anxiety. Now it was: Should people be able to do what Thiel had done? Is the entire right to a free press imperiled? The Los Angeles Times would say that of all the possible twists in the story, “few developments could be more frightening,” and The Guardian, publishing across the Atlantic in a country with historically more accessible libel laws, nonetheless predicted that Thiel had given his fellow billionaires a playbook and that the case was “a chilling taste of things to come.”