![]() ![]() If Thiel is successful in destroying Gawker, he will martyrize them. Secrecy? Proxy lawsuits? Fraudulent client solicitation? All of those are on the table now. What media entrepreneur can afford to regularly take on Thiel’s lawsuits? But in that same stroke, he has validated the concerns of many dissenters and blessed new rules of engagement with the Silicon Valley establishment. With a single wire deposit, Thiel has made a tabloid that covers Silicon Valley untenable as a business. Thiel just crucified the most notorious dissenter of Silicon Valley and called it ‘philanthropy.’ If this is how Silicon Valley billionaires are going to treat their dissenters, then dissenters have no choice but to go underground. The world is waking up to the hypocrisy and grotesque wealth of the valley - they want to know who these obscenely rich people are and they’re not always going to be nice in their questioning. My worry, as someone who works in tech, is that support of Thiel is going to backfire and everyone in tech will suffer. Why can’t Silicon Valley counter speech with speech? Why do you need to use a proxy lawsuit? Many legal experts predict that Gawker will win the Hulk Hogan case on appeal but it won’t even matter because fighting the lawsuit took so much money that it bankrupted the company. They certainly have screwed up sometimes, but there’s a reason we made freedom of the press, the first amendment. ![]() ( How many thousands of people have been outed on Facebook or bullied to the point of self destruction?) They will misconstrue the intentions of Gawker as literal ‘evil’ while they take the intentions of Zuckerberg at his word. It doesn’t matter how much incredible work they have done, they will point, hysterically, to a handful of articles that they believe cross their line. Gawker alumni are now editors at nearly every prestige media outlet in NYC.Īny defense of Gawker falls on deaf ears to most of Silicon Valley. They have run tens of thousands of stories, broken huge news, pioneered a sustainable ad model (without any VC cash), admitted mistakes, and deeply influenced the way you deliver truth to power online. ![]() Each of these sites and communities has grown and evolved in the past 10 years. Make something people want.Īll of these are things that Gawker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jezebel, Deadspin, Jalopnik and Lifehacker have done. The site stopped publishing in 2016.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. The lawsuit settled for $31 million, and forced Gawker Media to file for bankruptcy. Gawker also published an article outing Thiel as gay, which he said violated his privacy, as well. Thiel has claimed he funded the legal case because Hogan’s privacy was violated. Thiel secretly funded a lawsuit Hulk Hogan brought against Gawker after the blog published a sex tape of the wrestler, his wife, and Florida radio-show host Bubba the Love Sponge. The agreement was filed in bankruptcy court in New York, with Thiel agreeing to “to withdraw from the sale process and to provide the eventual buyer a legal release for articles in the Gawker archive.” It comes after “more than a year of legal wrangling,” and after Thiel made a bid on the site in January, according to the Journal. Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel agreed not to buy on Wednesday to avoid a potential legal battle stemming from the lawsuit he secretly bankrolled against the blog's publisher, according to the Wall Street Journal. ![]()
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