Peter Thiel On Gawker Takedown: 'One Of My Greater Philanthropic Things That I've Done'

Peter Thiel says he backed Hulk Hogan's lawsuits against Gawker Media in order to punish the publisher for stories it ran about him and his friends.

The Silicon Valley billionaire told the New York Times that he was upset about a 2007 article outing him as gay, among other stories.

[...] Thiel says he began paying attorneys to scout for lawsuits that he could fund against Gawker Media years ago, after being prompted by "one of my friends [who] convinced me that if I didn't do something, nobody would."

"It's less about revenge and more about specific deterrence," Thiel said. "I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.

"Even someone like Terry Bollea [Hogan's real name] who is a millionaire and famous and a successful person didn't quite have the resources to do this alone," Thiel said.

Thiel added that "it's safe to say" that this isn't the only case against Gawker that he has financed, and that he thinks of it as "one of my greater philanthropic things that I've done."

[...]He estimated that the litigation has cost him around $10 million, and added he has no current plans to sue other news outlets.

"It's not like it is some sort of speaking truth to power or something going on here," Thiel said. "The way I've thought about this is that Gawker has been a singularly terrible bully. In a way, if I didn't think Gawker was unique, I wouldn't have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean."