Gawker revenge is a dish best served with $140 million in damages according to billionaire Thiel
From the New York Times:
A billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur was outed as being gay by a media organization. His friends suffered at the hands of the same gossip site. Nearly a decade later, the entrepreneur secretly financed a lawsuit to try to put the media company out of business.
…
A 2007 article published by Gawker’s Valleywag blog was headlined, “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” That and a series of articles about his friends and others that he said “ruined people’s lives for no reason” drove Mr. Thiel to mount a clandestine war against Gawker. He funded a team of lawyers to find and help “victims” of the company’s coverage mount cases against Gawker.’
I guess if the law allows Peter Thiel to do what he is doing then there are broader issues at play in the increasingly insane Hulk Hogan vs Gawker story. Though Thiel describing his funding of the lawsuit as “philanthropic” make him sound like a character in Silicon Valley. A billionaire putting a media company that he fundamentally disagrees with out of business is more terrifying than heart-warming, no matter what you think of Gawker.
Still a great lesson for journalists: don’t comment on the life of a billionaire. It might just sink your publication, and your own bank account.
