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

by Ryan Holiday

The conspirators have not just won the hearts and minds of the people, they have turned them into the executioners. Their message to Gawker, and to the media which has grown to sympathize with them as Hogan’s flaws were exposed and the verdict drew closer, is resounding: We want these people gone.

In Gatsby, Carraway had been in awe of Wolfsheim. “How did he happen to do that?” he asks of the 1919 World Series plot. Gatsby answers: “He just saw the opportunity.”

Mr. A would say, “I had a sense—whether Peter knew it himself—that he wanted to be known. He wanted to do it quietly, but after this great victory he wanted to be known.”

March 2016,

“We thought it was reasonable to bring those cases because Harder had just won and presumably there would be a lot more people talking to him and more plaintiffs looking to file with him after he had this spectacular success,” Peter says. But the unintended result is a showing of their hand, an overplaying of their hand. Two more cases, so close together, so much less sympathetic than a stolen sex tape, harder to write off as simple justice.

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.”

Thiel is just as unprepared for it. “We didn’t think it was going to happen, so yes, we were caught by surprise.” He is caught by surprise not only by the news, but by the direction that news begins to go. Though on May 25, the hashtag #ThankYouPeter would briefly spike on Twitter—driven mostly by alt-right and Gamergate accounts—and many of his Silicon Valley colleagues would cheer the audacity of what he had pulled off, the reaction from the rest of the media was almost overwhelmingly negative. The revelation of Peter’s name immediately flips the narrative that many reporters and commenters had been running with. Now all of a sudden, it wasn’t Gawker, the bully, beating up on Hulk Hogan, it was a megalomaniacal billionaire threatening free speech. The idea that Gawker could have perhaps quite handily prevailed at trial with a better legal strategy was immediately replaced by the perception that Gawker never had a chance.

Ridiculous resulting

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.

In the Girardian view, violence is reciprocal and imitative. It escalates in a never-ending cycle, often taking society along with it. Hamlet avenging the murder of his father, until he is killed in turn. Saddam Hussein and Bush Sr. Bush Jr. and Saddam Hussein. The noose is put over Saddam’s head, but it gives way to the next feud. Shiites and Sunnis. Americans and ISIS. Sworn blood feuds lasting for generations.

Though Thiel would receive many private congratulatory messages from CEOs, celebrities, actresses, investors, and even other journalists when the story originally broke, as the coverage wore on, members of his billionaire class turned on him.

Scipio Africanus, the general who defeated Hannibal, would say that an army should not only leave a road for their enemy to retreat by, they should pave it. The Romans had a name for this road, the Gallic Way.

Gawker Media would settle with Terry Bollea for roughly $31 million. Ashley Terrill and Shiva Ayyadurai, the defendants in those two cases Thiel and Harder had rammed through at the end that had contributed to Thiel’s exposure, would receive $500,000 and $750,000 respectively. A.J. walked away without any real financial burden. In March 2017, Denton settled with Bollea, who, dropping the $10 million jury award against Denton, would let him emerge with roughly $15 million based on his shares in Gawker Media. The media firm Univision acquired Gawker Media for $135 million in a bankruptcy auction. “My own sense is that if Hogan ended up with more money from it than Denton,” Peter said of his plan, “that would be enough to count as a very solid win.”

The fact that Hulk Hogan, a “single-digit millionaire” as Thiel put it, would not otherwise have had the funds to pursue a case like this means that there might be many other legitimate legal precedents or cases that have otherwise gone unpursued out of intimidation or lack of funds (it cannot be said with a straight face that A.J. and Nick did not have “legal protection”). Having actually gone through the system, Thiel would come to believe that maybe there weren’t enough lawsuits. That people should try more. And so he puts more money behind the idea, funding in 2016 a start-up called Legalist, conceived by a Thiel fellow, dedicated to bankrolling lawsuits with a high probability of winning and possibly setting new precedents.

“Peter Thiel is a contrarian, first and foremost. You just have to remember that contrarians are usually wrong.” It certainly looked that way, until November 10, and then I would get an email from Peter: “Contrarians may be mostly wrong, but when they get it right, they really get it right.”

I stood a few paces behind and felt myself recalling the line from Hamlet: He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.

Still, I suspect if Thiel’s victory is truly unjust and contrary to what people want, it will not last long. Peter Thiel’s claim that destroying Gawker was “one of the most philanthropic” things he has ever done can be challenged (for what it’s worth, Dumas has the Count of Monte Cristo, as he sought his revenge, refer to himself as a “kind of philanthropist,” too), but what is indisputable is that he saw his actions as a kind of social good and there is something to be admired in that.