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1-Page Summary of Conspiracy

Overview

A conspiracy was carried out by Peter Thiel, a billionaire and Hulk Hogan against Gawker. It took nearly 10 years to plan the attack, which involved Hogan suing Gawker over a sex tape. The odds of winning were long, but they succeeded in taking down the media site.

Gawker is a website that publishes news and gossip. It has a structure where writers are encouraged to publish stories that attract readers, which sometimes means publishing things that aren’t necessarily ethical. The company’s culture encourages negativity, and the pace of work is so fast that people don’t have time to think about what they’re writing before they post it online.

Gawker was founded in 2002. It had a low standard and produced a lot of content, but it also got a lot of traffic. The company was sued by many people who were unhappy with the things that Gawker wrote about them, but those cases never went to court. In 2007, Owen Thomas came out on social media as gay. He published an article about tech investor Peter Thiel being gay too; Thiel hadn’t wanted his sexuality to be made public because he feared offending his conservative clients. He thought that no one else’s business should involve him being outed or not, and he didn’t consider himself a public figure despite having won big investments in companies like PayPal and Facebook. Because of this post and comments from the founder Nick Denton (who called Thiel paranoid), Thiel became upset at Gawker for publishing the post without his consent or even warning beforehand so that he could have been prepared for what would happen next if someone found out—he felt like they’d capriciously hurt him without caring how it might affect him personally or professionally.

In 2007, Thiel wrote an article about his belief that Gawker was comparable to Al Qaeda. The post incited hatred for the site from other media outlets and bloggers. In 2008, Gawker continued to publish snide articles about Thiel’s business dealings and the public began to hate him as well. For years, he considered how he could fight back against their attacks but knew it would be too expensive for him to do so because of insurance that protected them in case they were sued by anyone who felt wronged by their articles.

Peter Thiel and an acquaintance came up with a plan to destroy Gawker. The man, who was just finishing law school, wanted to impress Peter Thiel so he proposed taking down the website. He said that it could be done in 5 years at a cost of $10 million. He would lead the attack by finding legal strategies and building a team of lawyers to do the job.

Over the years, Peter Thiel and Mr. A had limited conversations because they didn’t want to leave an email trail. They hired Charles Harder who quit his law firm to work for this secret client of Thiel’s. His job was to comb through Gawker’s records for any signs of illegal activity or potential illegal activity.

The legal team was told to focus on the law and avoid anything that would get them in trouble. They went through Gawker’s backlog posts looking for ways to sue, but they decided against libel or defamation cases because they’d be difficult to win due to precedent and reputation. Instead, they searched for a way in which Gawker’s lawyers wouldn’t know what hit them.

A.J. Daulerio, the editor in chief of Gawker, published a video that had been secretly recorded five years earlier by Bubba the Love Sponge and Hulk Hogan’s wife Heather Clem. The video was part of an article posted on Gawker where it received millions of views, much to Hogan’s chagrin.

A wealthy man, Mr. A, was aware of a situation involving Hulk Hogan and Gawker. He contacted another wealthy person, Peter Thiel (who later turned out to be the financier), and informed him about the situation. Thiel then offered to pay for Hogan’s legal fees because he despised Gawker so much that he wanted them destroyed. Even though this would cost a lot of money in legal fees, Hogan refused to settle with Gawker since his goal was to get revenge on them for posting the sex tape online in 2012.