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Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue by [Ryan Holiday]

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Ryan Holiday

Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue Kindle Edition

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An NPR Book Concierge Best Book of 2018!

A stunning story about how power works in the modern age--the book the New York Times called "one helluva page-turner" and The Sunday Times of London celebrated as "riveting...an astonishing modern media conspiracy that is a fantastic read." Pick up the book everyone is talking about.

In 2007, a short blogpost on Valleywag, the Silicon Valley-vertical of Gawker Media, outed PayPal founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel as gay. Thiel's sexuality had been known to close friends and family, but he didn't consider himself a public figure, and believed the information was private.

This post would be the casus belli for a meticulously plotted conspiracy that would end nearly a decade later with a $140 million dollar judgment against Gawker, its bankruptcy and with Nick Denton, Gawker's CEO and founder, out of a job. Only later would the world learn that Gawker's demise was not incidental--it had been masterminded by Thiel.

For years, Thiel had searched endlessly for a solution to what he'd come to call the "Gawker Problem." When an unmarked envelope delivered an illegally recorded sex tape of Hogan with his best friend's wife, Gawker had seen the chance for millions of pageviews and to say the things that others were afraid to say. Thiel saw their publication of the tape as the opportunity he was looking for. He would come to pit Hogan against Gawker in a multi-year proxy war through the Florida legal system, while Gawker remained confidently convinced they would prevail as they had over so many other lawsuit--until it was too late.

The verdict would stun the world and so would Peter's ultimate unmasking as the man who had set it all in motion. Why had he done this? How had no one discovered it? What would this mean--for the First Amendment? For privacy? For culture?

In Holiday's masterful telling of this nearly unbelievable conspiracy, informed by interviews with all the key players, this case transcends the narrative of how one billionaire took down a media empire or the current state of the free press. It's a study in power, strategy, and one of the most wildly ambitious--and successful--secret plots in recent memory.

Some will cheer Gawker's destruction and others will lament it, but after reading these pages--and seeing the access the author was given--no one will deny that there is something ruthless and brilliant about Peter Thiel's shocking attempt to shake up the world.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“...a profound masterwork by a talented young writer...one helluva page-turner"—The New York Times

“In this age when people compete to be contrarian, it’s rare to encounter a genuinely startling proposition. That’s what makes the premise of Ryan Holiday’s ‘Conspiracy’ such a delight...’” —The Washington Post

“Brilliant and terrifying.” —Rich Cohen, author of The Fish That Ate the Whale and contributing editor of Vanity Fair

“A fantastic read.”—The Sunday Times

"Startlingly deep cultural history of conspiracies, examined through the lens of the brutally effective Gawker takedown, with full access to the main players." --Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz

“An artful examination of how true power really works and how it affects all of us.”—Michael Lombardi, host of GM Street on The Ringer and former Cleveland Browns general manager

“Every one of Ryan Holiday’s books is appointment reading for me. If he writes it, I make the time to read it.”—Brian Koppelman,producer and creator of Billions

“CONSPIRACY will captivate you, terrify you, intrigue you, and piss you off. It’s a sizzling, can’t-put-down, read-it-in-one-sitting story. Ryan Holiday has crafted a hell of a book!” -Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author of SPYMASTER

“Ryan Holiday is one of his generation’s finest thinkers.”—Steven Pressfield, bestselling author of Gates of Fire

“This book is the Art of War for any twenty-first century conspirator....A brilliant meditation on strategy, with numerous lessons.”—Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power and Mastery

"Riveting...an astonishing modern media conspiracy...that is a fantastic read. Holiday is a fine writer. He brilliantly elucidates... [with] a reporter's eye for detail." --The Sunday Times of London

“More than mere business history, Holiday elevates the story into something far more lasting, casting Thiel's actions into the timeless mold of the conspirator: the man who, armed with patience and an indignant urge to reshape the world, co-opts allies, musters resources, lulls adversaries, and ultimately strikes when the time is right, changing everything. 'Conspiracy' will be the last word, the veil-lifting exposé, on that Gawker/Thiel war all of us read about, but none of use really understood, until now.” – Antonio Garcia Martinez, author of Chaos Monkeys

About the Author

Ryan Holiday is one of the world's foremost thinkers and writers on ancient philosophy and its place in everyday life. He is a sought-after speaker, strategist, and the author of many bestselling books including The Obstacle Is the Way; Ego Is the Enemy; The Daily Stoic; and the #1 New York Times bestseller Stillness Is the Key. His books have been translated into over 30 languages and read by over two million people worldwide. He lives outside Austin, Texas, with his family. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: The Inciting Incident

"The beginnings of all things are small," Cicero reminds us. What becomes powerful or significant often begins inauspiciously, and so, too, do the causes that eventually pit powerful forces against one another.

The conflict at the heart of this story is no different. Its genesis is a largely obvious, mostly unremarkable blog post-not even four hundred words long-that outed a little-known technology investor as homosexual. Written by a gossip blogger named Owen Thomas, for a now-defunct tech news website owned by Gawker called Valleywag, the piece was published at 7:05 p.m. on December 19, 2007, under a headline that would sear itself into the mind of its subject:

Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People.

It wouldn't be fair to say, as some partisans have in the intervening years, that Owen Thomas was some reckless blogger who plucked some private citizen from nowhere for his story. He'd been a reporter for over a decade, and Peter Thiel had a media profile as an investor and an entrepreneur. Thiel had made a fortune as a founder of PayPal and put the first $500,000 into Facebook. The man had previously posed for photographers and agreed to be interviewed by reporters who were covering him or his companies. And it was not disputable that he was, in fact, gay.

Peter admits that his sexuality was no revelation. "I think everyone already knew in 2007," he told me. By that he means that his parents knew he was gay. His friends knew and so did his colleagues. But it was not a fact he advertised. A friend would say that Peter burned to be the best technology investor in the world. To insert "gay" into that, to be seen as the best gay technology investor, seemed artificially limiting. Like it was cheating him of something he was desperate to earn. And so Peter Thiel's sexuality stood as a kept but open secret in the close-knit community of the Silicon Valley elite.

To the modern mind, this reticent gay identity seems like an anachronism, but when you do the math, you quickly realize how different the world was in 2007. The Democrat who would be elected president in less than a year's time was still five years away from announcing his support for same-sex marriage. The woman who opposed him in the primary would take an additional year to come around. 2007 was also much closer to the burst of the dot-com bubble than it is to the present day. Facebook's IPO lay five years in the future and most of the astonishing success of this class of start-ups from Twitter to Netflix still lay ahead.

While Thiel was not no one in late 2007 when the story broke, Peter Thiel was not then Peter Thiel. He was not the person he would be at the end of this story, the idiosyncratic lion of Silicon Valley venture capital or controversial political power broker. Thiel was more like all the other technology investors most people have never heard of. Do the names Max Levchin or Roelof Botha sound familiar to the average person? They were Thiel's partners in PayPal. Or the name Jim Breyer? He put a million dollars in Facebook less than a year after Thiel put in his half million. What about Maurice Werdegar, who put in money with Thiel in that famous seed round? Few have even heard of these people, let alone cared whom they slept with. They are, as far as popular culture is concerned, as Thiel was then, barely notable. And he was, above all, a quiet, private person.

When one considers Thiel's burning ambitions against this backdrop, and the potential for this Valleywag story to be the first thing to broadly define him outside the Valley, one might better understand Thiel's reaction to Owen Thomas's small, unexceptional story and the flippant headline that went with it.

"It was like a full-on attack out of the blue. There was nothing I had ever done to these people in any way whatsoever. On a superficial level, the article was just about outing me," Peter said. It wasn't the outing itself, however, that most got to him, but the second narrative, that he has psychological problems because he didn't want to be outed. "It was never about the Owen Thomas article," Thiel eventually admitted to me. "It was the Nick Denton comment."

In the comments section at the bottom of Owen Thomas's story, Nick Denton, Valleywag's editor and the founder of its parent company, Gawker Media, had posted a few sentences in the form of an accusation that seemed to respond to itself: "The only thing that's strange about Thiel's sexuality: why on earth was he so paranoid about its discovery for so long?"

By normal, journalistic standards, this commentary would be extraordinary. For a founder and publisher to editorialize and speculate from the peanut gallery of his publication's own comments section? Yet by 2007, this kind of combative, adversarial approach to the news and its subjects was standard operating procedure for the somber, perpetually scruffy Englishman with cherubic cheeks, a love of technology, and a passion for gossip.

Even those who hate Nick Denton would describe him as brilliant. Born Nicholas Guido Anthony Denton to a British economist father and psychotherapist mother of Jewish-Hungarian descent, Denton attended Oxford University. He sold his first company, a networking group for people in the tech industry, for millions. When he started his online media company in 2002, his love for tech was at the forefront of his mission: Gizmodo, the first of the many sites that would comprise his publishing empire, was a "vertical blog devoted to superskinny laptops, spy cameras, wireless wizardry, and all manner of other toys for overgrown boys. All gadgets, all the time."

Roughly four months later, he launched a new site dedicated to his other, more primal passion: secrets and gossip. He named it Gawker. Technology may have been Denton's first love, but many would say this-his lust to expose, to reveal, to lob bombs-was Denton's true love, a side of him that ran parallel to his urge to build. He would name his celebrity site Defamer (one blogger joked, "Why not go all the way and call it 'Defendant'!"), and he would name his porn site Fleshbot, but it was Gawker that would stick as the name of the parent company, since it so well described the editorial ethos of Denton's online empire and captured the pathos of its founder perfectly.

Gawker's first editor, Elizabeth Spiers, was paid $2,000 per month for twelve posts a day, seven days a week. Her job was to mock the club of New York elites she had never been invited to join. Her job was to, with a kind of humorous contempt that's come to be called snark, dismiss people and institutions as laughably unimportant, even as, in writing about them, she was in fact admitting how important they actually were (and that perhaps, deep down, she'd like to join them some day). Denton had a knack for recruiting talent like her, and for cultivating their voices as he did with Spiers and, eventually, Owen Thomas. He liked young writers with drive and wit, and a gift for pointing at hypocrisy and vulnerabilities that brought audiences quickly and cheaply. Within six months, Denton's sites were pulling in more than 500,000 page views a month. Within a year, the blogs were making more than $2,000 per month each; within three years they were estimated to be generating at least $120,000 in advertising revenue per month. A little over ten years into Gawker's run, its revenues would be nearly $40 million a year and the sites would have more than 40 million readers a month. Denton had struck a rich and dark vein. He had harnessed a modern, digital take on the old tabloid sensibility that, George W. S. Trow once observed, requires a sort of "back and forth of loathe and love of old authority." This pinging between self-pity and self-importance would be Gawker's secret formula.

"As a publishing entrepreneur who built an operation out of nothing, I had to go where the energy was," Denton would say. That energy was mostly the energy of disillusioned youth, of outsiders criticizing insiders. In being anti this and that, and rarely for something else instead. Mankind has always crucified and burned, a great playwright once said. We take a secret pleasure in the misfortune of our friends, said another wise man. For Gawker it was no secret pleasure but a conspicuous one and to it they added the power of blogging. Nick's instincts were captured and compounded by the economics of his instruments: twenty-something writers with school debt and little income. Overeducated children of Boomers, the children of parents whose idealism became materialism, the writers believed they had something to say because those same parents had told them they were special and important and talented.

Previous generations of writers came to New York City with a dream. This generation came with a bone to pick-for the broken economy, for the collapse of old industries, for the hypocrisy and fakeness that had finally become acute. They wanted a seat at the Algonquin and ended up sharing a bedroom in Bushwick, writing twenty articles a week (nineteen of which no one would read) for $12 apiece. Of course they were pissed. A New York Times writer would later dub this ethos the "rage of the creative underclass." A Gawker headline captures it better: "It's OK to Be a Hater Because Everything Is Bad."

The existentialists spoke of ressentiment, or the way that resentment creates frustration which fuels more resentment. Philosophers might have said this feeling was pointless, but they knew it was a fearful force. Gawker would revel in ressentiment, of its writers and readers. Like most movements that harness the power of an underappreciated class, the environment was temperamental and volatile, but you could not argue that the results were not also entertaining and forceful. Especially when combined with financial incentives.

Denton experimented with different forms of compensation in the early years, but his most important shift was away from a raw number of posts per day (how many things can you make fun of today) toward page views (how many people agree with what you're making fun of). Denton's mind gravitates toward small publishing innovations like these. His sites were some of the first to post the view count at the top of the article. He notices that his writers obsess over this number, refreshing the stat counter over and over, and begins to pay them accordingly. He puts up a large screen in the office that ranks the writers and the articles based on traffic. He calls it the "NASDAQ of Content," but it's closer to the millennial id. If the untapped energy of young people was his first great breakthrough, this is his second. The first offers the power of being heard, the second provides the power of reach and then of quantification-turning blogging into something you can win. How? By getting the most readers. With what? That's for you to decide.

What Denton did, in effect, was turn writing, social commentary, and journalism into a video game. Writing wasn't a craft you mastered. It was a delivery mechanism. The people and companies you wrote about, like Peter Thiel, weren't people, they were characters on a screen-fodder for your weekly churn. And the people you got to read this writing? They were points. The score was right there next to your byline. Views: 1,000. 10,000. 100,000. 1,000,000. The highest prize, the best ticket to traffic? Scandalum magnatum-going after great men and women. But in a bind, and with so many posts to get out each day, ordinary people would do just as well.

Gawker Stalker: Elijah Wood Emphatically Not a Gay

Joe Dolce: Portrait of an Asshat

Danyelle Freeman Sucks: The Marrow Out of Life, in General

Which NYC Food Critic Is an Idiot? (Hint: Danyelle Freeman!)

Morley Safer Is a Huge Asshole

Stubborn Jew Rolled by More Stubborn Jewier Jew

Nightmare Online Dater John Fitzgerald Page Is the Worst Person in the World

Andy Dick Gets the Beat-Down We've All Craved

It's Not That Adam Carolla Isn't Funny, It's That Adam Carolla Is a Dumbfuck

Peaches Geldof's Heroin-Fueled One-Night Stand at Hollywood's Scientology Center-with Pictures

When Gawker creates "Gawker Stalker," a feature that lets anonymous users write in with sightings of celebrities so their locations could be tracked online in real time, or when a Gawker writer in 2007 wrote a piece that began, "When is it okay to hate a 4-year-old? Maybe when the kid's name is Elijah Pollack," and tagged it "The Sins of Their Fathers," they were practicing journalism by tomahawk. And it isn't scoops that the sites were looking for, it was scalps: who can we get, who did something stupid, what are other people afraid to say, and who are they afraid to say it about?

If a piece didn't go hard enough, if there were rumors the reporter wanted to talk about but couldn't justify even with Gawker's thin standards, there was always the comments section to push the story from behind-or the bottom, as it were-and drum up tips and speculation and titillation that might lead to more attention. It had always been Nick's nature to push deeper, to speculate, to needle, to drill down to the interesting stuff-and there was no deeper well of ressentiment than the endless scroll of the comments section.

It was all great fun for him, for his writers. Why wouldn't it be? Especially when the old guard yells at you, and you are the type who takes that as a sign you're doing everything right. Journalists, competitors, and leaders alike criticized this editorial style that Nick had invented. Watchdogs were on the lookout for the first Gawker victim suicide. Some inside Gawker even shared these concerns. But it cannot be said that readers didn't love Gawker. There was a unique freeness to what Gawker wrote, a kind of raw unfiltered honesty, an exaggerated way of telling the truth. Peter Thiel is totally gay, people! If something was true, if they thought something was true, they published it. The writers said the things that people thought in private-they fulfilled their wishes. They gave their readers-the people who made up those numbers at the top of each post-what their own bitterness and ressentiment had always craved but no one had seen fit to give them before.

A movie executive once described the "honeyed sting" of the notorious twentieth-century gossip Hedda Hopper as a black widow spider crossed with a scorpion, weaned on prussic acid and treacle. In a way, that was Gawker, too. The perfect conduit for the envy and schadenfreude and jockeying for power that goes on in this world. It's why their tip lines were never dry. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07637TDJJ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Portfolio (February 27, 2018)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 27, 2018
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1541 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 334 pages

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Ryan Holiday

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Ryan Holiday is one of the world's bestselling living philosophers. His books like The Obstacle Is the Way,Ego Is the Enemy,The Daily Stoic, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Stillness Is the Key appear in more than 40 languages and have sold more than 5 million copies. Together, they've spent over 300 weeks on the bestseller lists. He lives outside Austin with his wife and two boys...and a small herd of cows and donkeys and goats. His bookstore, The Painted Porch, sits on historic Main St in Bastrop, Texas.

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Fidel Cashflow

A fascinating story that is excruciatingly painful to read This is the story of how one ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 10, 2018

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This is the story of how one of the world’s wealthiest and brilliant men, Peter Thiel, conspired to take down one of media’s most powerful men (at the time), Nick Denton, CEO of now defunct and infamous Gawker. The story itself is fascinating, and I appreciate that the author Ryan Holiday provided insight from all parties involved, however this book is absolutely painful to read at times, particularly the first third, and the ending chapters for different reasons. The story itself, could easily be told in half the length, but the book (I guess the author had to find ways to fill up 200+ pages) is filled, especially in the first hundred pages or so, almost entirely of conjecture into the minds of the people involved, repeating the same themes exhaustively over and over again (by the time you are done with the book, you will HATE the word “Conspiracy,” and everything pertaining to it because the word is used, described and explained ad nauseum), and for some odd reason, seemingly endless amount of quotes, from Dumas to Tolstoy- as if the author is trying to show off that, yes, he is well-read (I will get into that later).

Holiday’s bias, though not too overbearing (depending on how sensitive one is and on which side of the political spectrum one lies on), does manifest from time to time. It isn’t a big deal, because after all, this is his book with his narrative, not a piece of unbiased journalism, and to the author’s credit, he did a decent job keeping it relatively restrained. The few occurrences of bias rearing its ugly head, does detract from his work, however, because one is left wondering, what other parts of the narrative is tainted? For example, he paints Peter Thiel as bordering on maniacal, questioning how Thiel can write “a book that railed against multiculturalism and ‘militant homosexuals’ on campus, despite being both gay and foreign born.” From a libertarian standpoint, which Peter Thiel is, it makes total sense- for example, one can be African American, and unsupportive of Black Lives Matter if one sees it as a racist, bigoted, or violent movement. Likewise, a gay man can “rail” against “gay militarism,” if he thinks it is wrong. Holiday also suggests Thiel is a vengeful person, which may or may not be true, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he is, based solely on his decision to take on Gawker. Thiel could legitimately see himself as doing the right thing because the notorious “news” blog has ruined people’s lives, and perhaps the toxicity of its content is bad for society at large. Perhaps Thiel’s actions against Gawker are based not on desires of vengeance, but on a purely philosophical level- that personal privacy is a basic individual right that should not be exploited by yellow journalism behind the veil of the first amendment, lest individual freedoms be sacrificed for the sake of clicks.

From time to time throughout the book, Holiday points that out as well- that perhaps, Thiel acted in some combination of emotions, perhaps a little bit of vanity, a lot of resentment, and a smidgen of altruism. But Holiday makes no mistake to mention that it’s probably mostly out of paranoia, fear, and vengeance. Again, this is where the author’s bias can lead to misunderstanding of a libertarian mindset. This is most apparent when Holiday remarks how Thiel supported Trump at the Republican National Convention, and make a speech along a “list of fools he shared the stage with.” Well, at least Holiday did remark that as a Trump supporter, Thiel was “as at least, halfway sane.”

As stated earlier, however, what makes this book such a painful undertaking- almost chore-like, is that it is treated as if every thought, or action from the parties involved, as the story painstakingly unfolds, needed to be psychologically explained and reaffirmed with an obscure philosophical quote from some historical figure. For example, in one of his many psychoanalysis of Thiel’s decision to act against Denton and Gawker, Holiday explains loquaciously:

“In that it became important for Thiel to see Gawker as singularly bad, the conspirator takes up, often without consent, the mantle of defending (or freeing) a number of other people as his or her real reason for proceeding. It is a sort of self-serving selflessness, a shield against what is to come and the feeling it will provoke... I think of Sherman’s letter to the people of Atlanta, a city he believed must fall for his march to the sea to continue and for the North to win the Civil War. Though he’d once lived in the South… he now saw himself as an instrument of a power that must not be slowed down. To view Atlanta, this city that lay before him and his plans, as the sum total of its people would be to make the whole affair personal, not professional, and thus impossible. ‘You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will… War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.’”

Alone, this isn’t so bad, but this book is filled to the brim with examples of such dramatic, and at times, over-the-top diatribe, with quotes from Cicero to Clausewitz. In fact, just to give you an idea, in ONE page, Holiday quotes Civil War General Sherman, The Count of Monte Cristo (I kid you not) and William James. This is not to say that all the quotes are mundane- some do serve a purpose, particularly Liddell Hart’s (the British Historian) strategies of war, and Machiavelli, whose themes in The Prince, are repeated throughout the book. But when quotes are used exhaustively, it becomes such a burden, that one is left wondering whether to continue on with the book, of skip paragraphs if not pages. You can argue, aside from some build-up of background information on the characters and what Gawker did to Peter Thiel, Part 1 (7 chapters) can largely be skipped.

As the story unfolds, after Part 1, the pace does thankfully pick up and it does become quite fascinating. It is almost as if this story is Machiavelli’s the Prince, or Sun Tzu's the Art of War manifested, depending on, of course, how accurately Holiday’s depiction of the characters are, or rather, how much of it you believe (this is where the author’s bias casts doubt). Assuming all Holiday’s psychoanalysis and conjectures are indeed accurate, readers can expect an intriguing story about how a genius billionaire took down a media mogul.

Finally, the last few chapters do drag, and this is where Holiday takes his narrative freedoms up a notch. He goes excessively into politics. What Thiel’s support of then candidate Trump has little if anything to do with the story, and serves no purpose other than for Holiday to inject some political commentary. He describes members of the movement #Gamergate as “alt-right,” and their style of attack as “loud, insistent, delusional”- a description that can be used to describe any opposing political movement depending on which side one is on, and links them incredulously to Thiel. The rest of the chapter, for some reason, is largely used as an attack on Trump. Ironic, for a person who wrote a book entitled, "Trust me, I’m Lying."

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Briochegal

Detailed, well-written story of a plan to take down Gawker

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 28, 2022

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Explaining and following all the threads and players in this shocking story would be difficult if it weren’t for Holiday’s clear, concise writing. Not only are the twists and turns of the plot explained, but the various characters come through. Thiel’s reclusiveness, Denton’s cockiness, the lawyers’ missteps are all laid out. Thiel’s role is all this is shocking and fascinating. Was it fair for him to use his almost-unlimited resources to bring down a website against whom he held a grudge? Was justice served? What would have happened in Hogan’s case had Thiel not been pulling the strings behind the scenes? Was the Gawker staff irresponsible? Or exercising their First Amendment rights?

A fascinating story told with clarity and balance. Unputdownable.

2 people found this helpful

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Bradley Bevers

A Chess Match Between Two Titans And What It Means For You

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 3, 2018

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One of my favorite authors, John McPhee, wrote a book about single tennis match called Levels of the Game. A book about a single tennis game does not sound like there can be much to it, but the story of the match is really the story of two men, how they were raised, what lead them to that space and time and playing style, and what that match meant as a pivoting point in race and culture. More than any other book, I was reminded of Levels of the Game while reading Conspiracy.

Most know the initial story - a private tape of Hulk Hogan released in the media - but the full story and its implications are well covered here. Holiday refers to Peter Thiel's love of chess more than once in the book, and this story also reminded me of a chess match. It's never a 'page-turner' in the traditional sense, but a very subtle battle between two opponents that swells over ten years. (I would highly recommend reading this rather than listening to it for that reason - there is enough depth to the story that it works best on the page, otherwise you will miss things).

I had read a little and already seen the Netflix documentary on the case, but here is what I really liked about the book:

* The story of the 'why did Peter Thiel do this' is much more complicated than can be explained by a documentary. Even after you remove all motives except for the personal, Holiday points out there were significant financial motives as well.
* Why choose the battlefield that they did? Thiel had almost limitless options to accomplish his ends, but chose a very specific means.
* I had not realized before reading this how much this case signals the clash between the right to privacy and the right to freedom that is still heading towards collision.
* Thiel is a fascinating guy, full of contradictions. One of my biggest takeaways is that I want to just learn more about him and read more about his Christian faith.
* There is not an easy answer to the question of who was right in this case, and Holiday does a good job of holding that tension for the entire book. Despite how despicable Gawker was in many cases and how easy it is to delight in their downfall, there is a real question of whether the ends justifies the means.
* The ultimate loser in this story, to me, is the legal system. It's very apparent that no one except for someone with very deep pockets could have made this happen. Depressing to realize that even a public figure like Hulk Hogan basically has no chance without being bankrolled by a billionaire in a case like this.

If you are interested in the story already, definitely pick this one up. There is a lot here that really adds to the public record and it is well worth your time to consider the larger questions it raises.

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Elodie

QUITE INTERESTING

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 1, 2019

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I bought this book on the advice of my husband, the poet Simon R. Gladdish, and I'm pleased I did. It is a fairly interesting account of the feud between tech billionaire Peter Thiel and digital publisher Nick Denton which resulted in the destruction of Denton's media empire, Gawker. If I have a criticism of the book, it's that Holiday is overly sympathetic towards Thiel. Nick Denton published gossip that people didn't want to read about themselves which is morally dubious but Peter Thiel successfully plotted and planned the utter destruction of Gawker, the bankruptcy of Denton and the unemployment of all his workers which, to my mind, is far worse.

4 people found this helpful

nevillek

Combines a dramatic story with real insights.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 24, 2018

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This is an odd book. On the one hand, it's the story of how a billionaire destroyed a media organisation because he didn't like the way they wrote. At first glance, not a likely source of empathy or page-turning suspension.
On the other hand, it bills itself as a "meditation on conspiracy", quoting from sources and historical examples to put the story in context. Ryan Holiday runs a newsletter outlining his recommended books, and it's clear he's got his inspiration from many of the books on that list. The writing doesn't always come off - some of the sentences are a little awkward, and some of the comparisons seem a little superficial.
But the book does work - it's clear, the story unfolds at a good pace but there are real insights here. If you've ever been caught up in office politics, this book will help you see what's going on. Even though most of the characters are not particularly likable, you do learn to see the world through their eyes - not an easy task!

2 people found this helpful

Ben Irving

Interesting but could have used some tighter editing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 15, 2018

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I found the story of the conspiracy well told and quite interesting (albeit not as shocking as perhaps the blurb makes out), and genuinely worth the read. However, it was hard not to get a little irritated by the ponderous nature of some of the points. For some reason, the author consistently gives four examples when making a point. This isn't something I'd ever thought about but generally in writing you'll see three examples or fewer... So four jars every time and feels really laboured. It's symptomatic of a wider need for a bit of trimming.

I liked the way the author draws upon a really wide variety of quotes and examples though, ranging from modern politics, to Shakespeare, to ancient Greece and the American civil war.

All in all, worth reading for quite an interesting story, but I wasn't blown away by the conspiracy itself and some of the writing is a little unpolished.

2 people found this helpful

Iain

About twice as ling as it needed to be...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 2, 2019

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Another reviewer commented that the writing is like his when he wants people to know how clever he is, and this feels accurate to me.
There is something about the way it's written that bugged me too; it seemed inconsistent in style. For example in the middle of a full-page-paragraph it reads:
"They know they could as Hogan for a comment. They knew they could have done some basic reporting after receiving the tape"
The switches between past and present tense really grated with me, in the way that once it's been noticed it can't be unnoticed.
It's definitely an interesting tale, and if you're better than me at skim reading the irrelevant bits and you don't mind the style it's probably a pretty good book, but towards the end I muttered to a friend "Can he not just finish this book?"

One person found this helpful

SAL

Unusual Writing Style but engrossing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 13, 2018

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Very in depth investigation (although I didn't hear much from Hulk Hogan in this book). The author also intersperses his investigation with his own interests in Greek philosophy which I've not seen before. I think it's quite clear in the end where his sympathies lay but nevertheless this is an intriguing story of how a billionaire can shape the world according to his own desires.

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