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

by Ryan Holiday

Plots of revenge and justice plots both begin, in their own way, with a transgression, against a person or the whole. And then someone deciding that they aren’t going to take it.

Taking your lumps for very public bad bets on the market is one thing. That’s the cost of doing business in the hedge fund world. But now he can’t even talk about politics without being made to sound like some drug-addicted fag?

What is this? And whose fault is it? Who should be blamed? Nick Denton. Valleywag. They did this to me, he thinks. Gawker is responsible for all this.

Most people, when they find something they don’t like, do that. They call it names. They complain. They make it bigger than it is, make it representative of some larger trend.

They think someone should do something, but never them. Not me. It’s a classic collective action problem:

we know things are bad, but they only affect each of us a little bit. So who is going ...

Plenty of people believe in the theory of so-called great men of history, but who believes I am that great man? Ther...

He venerated privacy, in creating space for weirdos and the politically incorrect to do what they do.

Because he believed that’s where progress came from.

These are the essential beginnings of a conspiracy. First, a slight of some kind, which grows into a larger dissatisfaction with the status quo. A sense that things should be different, and will be different, except for the worse, if something doesn’t change.

But then comes a second step, a weighing of the stakes. What if I do something about this? What might happen? What might happen if I do nothing?

Which is riskier: to act or...

History is uncertain on thi...

His anger is at odds with the cautious mind that is his nature; he is not a man prone to being ruled by his emotions.

Only after he has finished, with complete sincerity and deference, describing how most people think about the issue, will he then give you his opinion,

which almost always happens to be something radically unorthodox—all

he can’t help but sit down and estimate the potential costs of Gawker and its coverage on his business interests.

The downside risk might be in the billions of dollars. This is not an absurd estimation.

someone like Peter might consider would look something like this: if there is a 20 percent chance that Gawker will cost me $1 billion, then it makes perfect sense to spend up to $200 million trying to prevent that from happening.

Negative expected value—it’s a calculation Wall Street guys make every day.

There are, of course, better and easier ways to make money, and to protect money, than conspiring against a media empire that has a record of roughly dispatching its challengers.

But if he looked beyond Gawker’s potential cost to him in dollars to the cost to society in total, the math changed.

What are the potential risks to his partners and friends? To the global economy? What is the societal cost of the “Gawker jitters”?

For every dollar in revenue that Gawker makes, how much economic value is it destroying, for Peter and for other people?

if you’re crazy enough to see yourself as someone who has the power to shape the world, doing something about Gawker might also be logical and justified.

Only princes could afford to send an army against another army, he observed, but a conspiracy is available to every man.

Which is why it is usually the desperate who turn to conspiracy and why the powerful fear them so much.

It is the weaker party who relies on secrecy and surprise and “low tactics.” Because they have to.

Thiel’s main problem isn’t a legal one, it’s that he’s an outsider: not only does Thiel not like playing the game, he doesn’t even understand the game.

Choire would remark later about how much Peter reminded him of Nick.

Each of them seemed to be living in his own sci-fi novel, and human connection did not come readily for either of them.

Selfish people are easy to understand. They act on motives.

Gawker’s power in part came from pretending that it was more powerful than it was.”

As Gawker’s page views went from thousands to millions and then to billions annually, as the rest of the media rushed to court his favor (or avoid his disfavor) and copy Denton’s business model, he began to accumulate both real power and perceived power.

Power through his access, through his platform, through his ability to break stories that other media outlets would have to follow, and through his own growing wealth.

No one had challenged Gawker and won. In fact, almost no one had ever challenged the American media, period, and won.

Barbra Streisand sues to remove a picture of her house from the internet, and not only does she lose, but more people see the photo than otherwise would.

It is a behavioral phenomenon that gets dubbed, fittingly, the Streisand Effect and has stood as a warning since: the media always wins in the end.

It is interesting that Nick and Peter come to be in conflict with each other, because despite any public or power differential, they are at first glance so similar.

Girard’s theory of mimetic desire holds that people have no idea what they want, or what they value,

so they are drawn to what other people want. They want what other people have. They covet.

It’s this, Girard says, that is the source of almost all the co...

The conflict between Denton and Thiel was not simply ideological, it was personal and timeless, anthropological in the way that it was about far more than either of them.

“The

easy way to insulate yourself against snark is to preemptively snark. Snark before anybody else does. That’s a kind of classic defensive humor. Make fun of yourself before somebody else does and lower everybody’s expectations.

One can’t shame the shameless.

Gawker had embraced a role that meant it didn’t have any. It had preemptively made itself next to impossible to criticize. It was the bully that had convinced people it was the underdog, and was so confident in it, it even told everyone that’s what it was doing.

“I came to believe that the nastiness of the internet was not a function of a technology or various things that have gone wrong, but the function of one particularly nasty media company led by a particularly sociopathic individual and that if ...

“At the end of the day, Hayes convinced me there was nothing to do within ‘normal’ channels and pushed me toward either doing nothing or doing something outside the ‘normal’ channels—and

and we chose to do the latter,