Even two years later, it’s still hard to believe it happened. But in March 2016, Hulk Hogan did indeed drive Gawker Media into bankruptcy after it published a video of the wrestler having sex with his best friend’s wife. And he pursued his lawsuit with funding from billionaire investor and Facebook board member Peter Thiel.
A decade earlier, in its casually cruel way, Gawker had outed Thiel, so he decided, coldly and deliberately, to drive it out of business, secretly funnelling $10 million into cases against the US publisher.
Even Hogan himself didn’t know Thiel was his backer. The whole affair was, as Ryan Holiday describes in his new book, a conspiracy – one whose consequences reverberate to this day.
Did Thiel promote free speech? Many commentators would disagree. Yet Holiday – a Stoic populariser and self-described “media manipulator” – admires the investor’s calculation and persistence. Based on his interviews with Thiel and Gawker founder Nick Denton, he tells the story of the case, explaining why he thinks we need not less plotting, but more.
Here are some highlights of the interview, edited for clarity.
Gawker. It's easy for people in retrospect to go, they were a little snarky, sometimes they were mean. I know what it's like to be on the other side of a Gawker story. So I have a certain empathy for what Thiel was up against.
On the secretive Mr A, alleged to be Oxford graduate Aron D'Souza. My agreement with Mr A is that I would neither confirm nor deny his identity, so I’ll leave the reports to speculate. What I can say for certain is that there’s a meeting in Berlin in April 2011 where this recent college graduate sits down with a board member of Facebook and pitches him, but instead of pitching a startup, he suggests this conspiracy.
He predicts this would take three to five years, that it would cost north of $10 million, but he's very confident they could be successful. It's pretty remarkable that this 25, 26-year-old manages to predict almost exactly the timeline and budget that results in the unprecedented bankruptcy of a media outlet that was doing, at that time, more than five billion page views a year.
On conspiracies. As a society, particularly here in the US, we face a number of very deep systemic threats, including corruption and strong men, so perhaps there's something to learn from this ruthlessly effective conspiracy that set out to do something that no-one thought was possible, and in fact accomplished that thing.
On Peter Thiel. I don't know what he'll do next. But I can bet that it will surprise us and that it will make complete sense within his own almost incomprehensible, complete, interior worldview.
Ryan Holiday's Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue is published by Profile Books
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
