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

by Ryan Holiday

Given the resources he had to draw on, the limitlessness of the options is nearly true: they could have bribed employees at Gawker to leak information, or hired operatives to ruin the company from the inside. They could have directed hackers to break into Gawker’s email servers. Someone could have followed Nick Denton and, while he dined at Balthazar one morning, stolen his cell phone. A team could have attempted to bug the Gawker offices. You could fund a rival website, operate it at a loss, and slowly eat away at the razor-thin margins of Gawker’s business. Or create a blog that does nothing but report on gossip about Gawker writers—returning the very pressure and scrutiny they’d put on other people. “There are things that were very tempting, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Retributive justice,”