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