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

by Ryan Holiday

But like so many conspirators, they seem not to have stopped to ask, Okay, then what? A close friend of Peter’s told me that some friends had warned him against pursuing Gawker, explaining that were he to succeed, the rest of the media would hate him for it. This didn’t compute for Peter, the friend would say, he didn’t understand that the media was just as tribal as any other group. Peter had read the average citizen correctly. (Vice: “Most Americans don’t care that Peter Thiel crushed Gawker.”) What he missed was that to take down one media outlet would make him an enemy to all the others, even if they never liked Gawker to begin with. That it would be seen as an act of retribution and would invite retribution in return. “Peter genuinely believed the media would cheer him on,” he said. He didn’t think the media would consider Gawker one of their own. He thought they’d appreciate what he’d done. He had no contingency plan, it appears, because he thought it illogical that he’d need one. Peter, too, seems to have thought that victory would be the end in another way, that the public wouldn’t have wanted to know how this happened. While we may not live in a world of conspiracies anymore, our desire for conspiracy theories is endless. If someone like Hogan beats someone like Gawker, people are going to try to figure out how he did it and they’re not going to stop until they’re satisfied. A student of history should have known that.