The Weird Truth About Peter Thiel, the Tech Billionaire Who’s Trying to Kill Gawker.
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| From Bloomberg/Getty Images. |
Thiel is rife with contradictions.
Hogan, who sued the online news organization for defamation over the publication of a sex tape, won $140 million in damages in March. If Gawker fails to successfully appeal, Hogan’s award could potentially shut down Gawker Media, or force it to be sold in full. (Gawker founder Nick Denton has already been forced to sell a minority stake to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, allegedly to help pay his legal bills in the case.) Rumors that a secret, wealthy benefactor was bankrolling Hogan’s suits had swirled around the case for some time. On Monday, The New York Times reported that Denton himself suspected someone, perhaps in Silicon Valley, was funding the suits against Gawker, which specializes in skewering powerful people in tech, business, and media. Thiel has been among those written about extensively by Gawker’s now defunct tech blog, Valleywag. A 2007 article titled “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people” outed Thiel. A day after the Times report was published, Forbes confirmed the involvement of Thiel, who declined to comment on the matter.
Thiel, 48, is a complicated and contradictory character. An avowed libertarian, Thiel is both a big believer in privacy from the government and a co-founder of Palantir, a multi-billion-dollar start-up that collects data about its clients’ users and monetizes their personal information. The C.I.A.’s venture-capital arm has invested in Palantir. And while Thiel has been footing the legal bills that could shutter one news organization, he has also extended his financial support to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit foundation that defends “the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.”
Thiel believes that monopolies are a good thing for society, and that college is a waste of time and money. (His foundation selects and funds young adults under 20 years old every year to build new products and start-ups.) He has donated to conservative-libertarian pro-L.G.B.T. organizations, and has said he wishes politics could return to an era that more closely resembles the 1920s—before the New Deal, and the creation of the modern welfare state. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron,” he wrote.
Unlike virtually all of his fellow Silicon Valley 0.1 percenters, Thiel is backing Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and is slated to be a Trump delegate at the Republican National Convention this summer. But supporting Trump is not the only thing the billionaires have in common. Like the litigious real-estate mogul, who has a history of using his wealth to bleed enemies dry through the court system, Thiel has been using his vast fortune—anonymously, until now—to cut Gawker down to size. It’s still possible for Denton’s shrinking media empire to win against Thiel—Mother Jones recently fought and won a similar court case, but it cost them millions to do so. (A Florida judge on Wednesday denied Gawker’s motion for a new trial, though Gawker is likely to appeal.)
Thiel is entitled to his opinions, but his broader strategy—using vast sums of money to ostensibly shut down a media company whose coverage he doesn’t like—could set a dangerous precedent and have a chilling effect on the press as a whole. Gawker has already spent $10 million on its side of the lawsuit, the Times reports. If Hogan and Thiel prevail, the billionaire will have succeeded in effectively destroying a prominent, if flawed, fixture of the media landscape. All the donations in the world to the Committee to Protect Journalists wouldn’t offset that damage.
source: www.vanityfair.com
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