{"id":11703,"date":"2016-05-25T10:51:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T15:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=11703"},"modified":"2024-12-06T15:50:30","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T20:50:30","slug":"billionaire-peter-thiel-says-to-defend-journalism-he-needs-to-crush-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2016\/05\/25\/billionaire-peter-thiel-says-to-defend-journalism-he-needs-to-crush-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Billionaire Peter Thiel says to defend journalism he needs to crush it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Some billionaire venture capitalists fund bizarre research into how human beings might become immortal, while others want to set up a series of islands on which people could live without being subject to the laws of a specific country. And some get their lawyers to shop around for lawsuits they can fund in order to help put a news website out of business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peter Thiel, the man best known for his early investment in Facebook and for being a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, isn’t just any billionaire VC. He’s doing all of those things at the same time<\/em>. The Immortality Project and the Seasteading Institute seem harmless enough, for the most part, but Thiel’s funding of a $140-million lawsuit against Gawker Media is anything but\u2014if you have any interest in a free press, that is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Gawker founder Nick Denton suggested earlier this week that a wealthy benefactor was helping fund wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the company, Forbes<\/em> named Thiel<\/a> as the one providing the cash. Finally, late on Wednesday, the billionaire came forward and admitted to the New York Times<\/em> that he helped to finance<\/a> not just Hogan’s legal case, but at least one other case against Gawker, as part of a plan he has been working on for several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This was\u00a0originally published\u00a0at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Thiel denied that his motive was just revenge for stories that Gawker wrote about him, including one in 2007 that publicly revealed him to be gay. He said that his campaign against the site was about “deterrence,” because he believed Gawker has pioneered a “unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what about the threat that such a campaign might present to a free press or the First Amendment? Thiel brushed these concerns aside in his interview with the Times<\/em>. “I think much more highly of journalists than that. It\u2019s precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker,” he said. Is that going to help members of the press sleep soundly at night? It’s difficult to see how.<\/p>\n

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Some billionaire venture capitalists fund bizarre research into how human beings might become immortal, while others want to set up a series of islands on which people could live without being subject to the laws of a specific country. And some get their lawyers to shop around for lawsuits they can fund in order to … <\/p>\n

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