Anyway, Thiel’s public outing really got under his (I’m assuming) luxuriously soft (evil?) billionaire skin, so when Gawker released professional racist wrestler Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, he saw his chance to strike.
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On Wednesday, a Florida judge denied Gawker’s motion for a new trial and said the US$140 million jury verdict won’t be reduced, the Associated Press reported.
So, back in 2007, Gawker outed tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and an early Facebook investor.
He went on to state that the story Gawker broke about him was one of several that have “ruined people’s lives for no reason” and that Gawker pioneered “a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest”.
Meanwhile, the media company said it expects to win an appeal against Hogan, and that it’s always said it was exploring contingency plans.
Houlihan Lokey, managing director Mark Patricof, is advising Gawker regarding its options to deal with the legal clash against Hulk Hogan.
Thiel, now open about his sexual orientation, has not commented about the Forbes report, but has had a long history of issues with Gawker, reports The New York Times, including once describing company-owned website Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip site that quit publishing new posts in 2015, as being the “Silicon Valley equivalent of al-Qaida”. The company also wrote other articles that he said he considered critical of his friends and others. “I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations”, he told Andrew Ross Sorkin.
In a letter posted on Thursday night, Mr Denton said: “I can see how irritating Gawker would be to you and other figures in the technology industry”.
The company has not revealed whether or not it can afford the $140 million Hogan verdict.
Terry Bollea, known in the wrestling world as Hulk Hogan, sued Gawker for violating his privacy by posting a clip of Mr. Bollea having sex with the ex-wife of a former friend.
While Thiel has spoken out about protecting freedom of speech, he believes that “Gawker has been a singularly awful bully”.
“Gawker, the defendant, built its business on humiliating people for sport”, he said.
Founded in 2002, Gawker Media owns sites like Deadspin, Jezebel and Gizmodo in addition to its namesake title, which a year ago it retooled to focus more on political news. “I think much more highly of journalists than that”.
Clara Jeffrey, editor-in-chief at Mother Jones (a non-profit news outlet that has also been sued by a billionaire), is more succinct – labelling Thiel a “thin-skinned billionaire trying to bully press”.
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“My personal hunch is that it’s linked to Silicon Valley”. Gawker isn’t now for sale and there aren’t any bidders, but that could change if it loses an appeal, according to a person familiar with the matter.
