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Peter Thiel Makes a Bid for Gawker.com

posted by takyon on Monday January 15 2018, @03:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-told-you-so dept.

realDonaldTrump writes:

Thiel Makes a Bid for Gawker.com, a Site He Helped Bankrupt

Peter Thiel, the technology billionaire, submitted a bid this week to purchase Gawker.com, the remaining unsold property from the Gawker Media gossip empire that was nearly destroyed in 2016 by a lawsuit largely bankrolled by Mr. Thiel.

If approved, the acquisition could be the last step in a yearslong effort by Mr. Thiel to finish an independent journalism outfit that angered him in 2007 when it reported, without his permission, that he is gay, a fact widely known at the time in Silicon Valley.

Gawker.com has received other offers, and it is not clear if Mr. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, will prevail. A winning bid is expected to be announced in the coming weeks, if representatives of Gawker.com do not take the site off the market.

Previously: Hulk Hogan's Sex Tape and a Tech Billionaire's Revenge on Gawker
Gawker Files for Chapter 11; Won't Pay Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel Wants to Buy Gawker!

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 15 2018, @06:35AM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Monday January 15 2018, @06:35AM (#622467) Journal

    Pretty much:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawker [wikipedia.org]

    On June 10, 2016, Gawker announced its bankruptcy filing as a direct result of the monetary judgment against the company related to the Hulk Hogan sex tape lawsuit.

    [...] Hogan filed a lawsuit against Gawker and Denton for violating his privacy, asking for $100 million in damages; the trial was slated for July 2015. The cost of the lawsuit was partly funded by Peter Thiel, whom Gawker had previously outed in 2007.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @06:39AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @06:39AM (#622470)

    So this is definitely nothing to do with getting a well known brand for pennies on the dollar...

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @06:42AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @06:42AM (#622471)

      Ha! sorry to respond to myself but

      sucked them dry them bring them back as a slave! Ha! no vampire jokes there...

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday January 15 2018, @06:48AM

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Monday January 15 2018, @06:48AM (#622474) Journal

      It was brand built on its "journalists", who have already scattered into the wind and who will react very negatively to Thiel taking over.

      Sure, he'll get a site near the bottom of the top 10,000 Alexa ranks, but I doubt Thiel would try to make it profitable or build a new platform of journalists there. Maybe use it to aggregate some stories that Gawker would have never run or otherwise dance/piss on its grave by using it as a personal blog.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @10:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @10:45AM (#622520)

    IIRC, Thiel also funded a bunch of other people suing Gawker, no matter how questionable the lawsuit. His goal was to destroy Gawker, and that's what he did. In the process, he invented a strategy that anyone rich enough can use against any publication.

    This is not an imaginary or theoretical danger either---multiple important stories have already been almost buried [techdirt.com] because of fear of reprisal, and there's no way to tell how many of them were actually buried.