By Ryan Mac and Matt Drange 
 
 One of Silicon Valley's best-known investors has been footing a former wrestler’s legal bills in lawsuits against a shared enemy. 
 
 Peter Thiel, a PayPal cofounder and one of the earliest backers of Facebook , has been secretly covering the expenses for Hulk Hogan’s lawsuits against online news organization Gawker Media. According to people familiar with the situation who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, Thiel, a cofounder and partner at Founders Fund, has played a lead role in bankrolling the cases Terry Bollea, a.k.a. Hogan, brought against New York-based Gawker. Hogan is being represented by Charles Harder, a prominent Los Angeles-based lawyer. 
 
 A spokesperson for Thiel declined to comment. 
 
 The involvement of Thiel, an eccentric figure in Silicon Valley who has advocated for teenagers to skip college and openly supported Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, adds another wrinkle to a case that has garnered widespread attention for its implications over celebrity privacy and a publication’s First Amendment rights. During court proceedings, which ended in late March with a $140 million victory for Hogan, there had been rumors that a wealthy individual had funded Hogan’s case though there was never any hard evidence that surfaced to prove that was true. 
 
 On Tuesday, in an interview with The New York Times, Gawker founder Nick Denton said he had a “personal hunch” that the financial aid could be linked to someone in Silicon Valley. “If you’re a billionaire and you don’t like the coverage of you, and you don’t particularly want to embroil yourself any further in a public scandal, it’s a pretty smart, rational thing to fund other legal cases,” he told the Times. 
 
 It is not illegal for an outside entity to help fund another party’s lawsuit, and the practice, known as “third-party litigation funding” has become increasingly common in the U.S. Typically, the outside party negotiates for a defined share of any proceeds from the suit. 
 
 It is unclear how Thiel became connected to Hogan or Harder or if Thiel, who is worth $2.7 billion by FORBES’ estimates, is the only outside financial backer of the cases against Gawker. It is also unknown whether Thiel will see any of the proceeds won by Hogan in a Florida court. Gawker is currently appealing that ruling. 
 
 Money may not have been the main motivation in the first place. Thiel, who is gay, has made no secret of his distaste for Gawker, which attempted to out him in late 2007 before he was open about his sexuality. In 2009, Thiel told PEHub that now-defunct Silicon Valley-focused publication Valleywag, which was owned by Gawker, had the “psychology of a terrorist.” 
 
 “Valleywag is the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda,” Thiel said at the time. 
 
 When reached by phone on Tuesday, Denton said that he did not know of Thiel’s involvement but had “heard that name” along with others in the speculation that surrounded Hogan’s first lawsuit. (Hogan and Harder sued Gawker again in a Florida state court earlier this month alleging that Gawker attempted to extort Hogan over the release of a sex tape that was the subject of the first lawsuit.) When asked why he thought financial backing was coming from Silicon Valley, Denton said that exposing the money and power in the tech industry was a relatively recent practice. 
 
 “We write stories about powerful people in New York, but there are plenty of outlets writing stories about powerful people in New York,” he said. “We write stories about powerful people in LA, but there are plenty of outlets writing stories about powerful people in LA. What’s unique about Gawker is that we’re an internet publication and the tech industry is of particular interest to us. There are powerful people in Silicon Valley and the power of Silicon Valley is a relatively new phenomenon.” 
 
 Launched in 2006, Valleywag spent two years exposing the personal and sometimes darker sides to Silicon Valley’s wealthiest and most influential people before being folded into the larger Gawker site in 2008. It re-launched in 2013 before being decommissioned again in Dec. 2015, with Denton citing the company’s redeveloped focus on politics and culture as the reason behind its shuttering. 
 
 If Gawker fails in its appeal in Hogan’s first case, it may not be around much longer to explore that new focus. On top of the $140 million in total damages facing Gawker, the company has already likely accumulated millions of dollars in legal fees defending itself. Lawsuits like these can have a chilling effect on the rest of the media industry, said First Amendment expert Peter Scheer, as they may encourage other wealthy individuals to back litigation against media companies that run unflattering stories about them. 
 
 “That’s often the purpose of these cases,” said Scheer, the director of the First Amendment Coalition. “Winning is the ultimate chilling effect, but if you can’t win the case, you at least want the editors to think twice before writing another critical story about you.” 
 
 Scheer, who has followed the Gawker situation closely but was unaware of a relationship between Thiel, Harder and Hogan, said he expects to see more lawsuits like this one to be brought against other media organizations: “It’s more common today than it has ever been, because there are more private individuals with enough unrestricted cash to be able to do that.” 
 
 Harder, who could not immediately be reached by FORBES for comment on Tuesday, told The New York Times, “I do not discuss the finances of my clients, including any financial arrangements they have with my firm.” 
 
 A partner with Harder Mirell & Abrams LLP, Harder is a well-known Hollywood lawyer whose past clients included George Clooney, Julia Roberts and a slew of other celebrities. He is also representing plaintiffs against Gawker in other lawsuits, including a defamation case on behalf of Shiva Ayyadurai in Boston that was filed earlier this month. Ayyadurai, who claims to have invented email, was the subject of a story by Gawker journalist Sam Biddle, who wrote that the plaintiff was a “fraud” according to former colleagues. Ayyadurai’s lawsuit seeks “no less than $35 million in damages.” 
 
 Harder has represented writer Ashley Terrill since January and filed an amended complaint in her lawsuit against Gawker and Biddle in April. She alleges that the site published “a false and highly defamatory hit-piece” about her written by Biddle last year after she had initiated a working relationship with Gawker to publish a story. Earlier this month Gawker's lawyers argued that Terrill's case should be dismissed. On May 18, the judge in the case gave Terrill's legal team two weeks to file a second amended complaint before the case moved forward. As of Tuesday, no additional documents have been filed in the case." 
 
 It is unclear if Thiel is helping to fund Ayyadurai or Terrill’s cases against Gawker. 
 
 Lawyers for Hogan and Gawker are due back in a Florida court Wednesday morning to discuss a number of recent motions in the case, including one filed Monday by Gawker that opposes Hogan's motion for a final judgment. Hogan’s lawyers have asked the court to force Gawker and other defendants to put up $150 million in escrow before moving forward with the appeal the case, something that Gawker has also challenged. 
 
 Follow Ryan on Twitter at @RMac18 or email him at rmac@forbes.com. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattDrange at or email him at mdrange@forbes.com. 
 
 Update on May 30, 2016 at 3:30 a.m.: An earlier version of the story incorrectly spelled the name of a plaintiff who is suing Gawker Media. His name is Shiva Ayyadurai. ||||| On Tuesday night, Forbes reported that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel has been secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s $140-million lawsuit against Gawker Media that threatens to bankrupt the company. 
 
 Gawker boss Nick Denton got a hint years ago that this might be coming. When Gawker reported in 2007 that Peter Thiel was gay, Denton commented below the story that Thiel “was so paranoid that, when I was looking into the story, a year ago, I got a series of messages relaying the destruction that would rain down on me, and various innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, if a story ever ran.” 
 
 If being outed by Gawker was really the catalyst for Thiel’s decision to fund Hogan’s lawsuit seven years later, then, damn, that man is a true believer in revenge being a dish best-served cold. 
 
 Ironically, as many have pointed out, Peter Thiel was a long-time supporter of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and was quoted in the organization’s 2008 annual report saying that he’s a “true believer in the critical importance of free speech.” The organization’s executive director says Thiel’s support ceased in January 2013, which is, interestingly, a month after Hulk Hogan sued Gawker for posting an excerpt from a surreptitious sex tape made of him. 
 
 But Denton doesn’t think Thiel, who once called Gawker “the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda,” is the sole benefactor behind Gawker’s legal troubles. He previously told the New York Times that he had a “personal hunch” that Hogan’s expensive L.A.-based lawyer was being funded by multiple benefactors in Silicon Valley who don’t like that Gawker is exposing the money and power of the tech industry. 
 
 “What’s unique about Gawker is that we’re an internet publication and the tech industry is of particular interest to us,” Denton told Forbes’ Ryan Mac and Matt Drange. “There are powerful people in Silicon Valley and the power of Silicon Valley is a relatively new phenomenon.” 
 
 Gawker’s tech-focused blog Valleywag was a muckraking bee in the bonnet of the industry it covered–technology–from the moment it went live in 2006. Valleywag’s coverage was famous (or infamous) for bucking a trend in technology reporting that was notorious for not producing critical coverage of the industry. The site shut down in 2011, was revived in 2013, and then died again in 2015. 
 
 Valleywag was not interested in service journalism. It was not a gadget blog. It didn’t care about access. It didn’t care about maintaining relationships with publicists. It did not care about flattering people into giving them exclusive profiles. It tore through the often unctuous, incestuous coverage of Silicon Valley and technology like a great white shark in chummed waters. 
 
 It was, in other words, dedicated to uncompromising reporting. 
 
 In the service of pursuing that goal, it made a lot of enemies. Valleywag prided itself on going after the most powerful companies on Earth and the extremely wealthy people who ran them. These people, so used to having that power go unchecked, were very, very angry about being challenged on everything from tax avoidance to labor violations, rampant sexism and discrimination, oversized political donations, wealth inequality, aggressive lobbying and everything else wrong with Silicon Valley today. 
 
 Who could be mad? Mad enough to fund a lawsuit angling to shut down Valleywag’s parent company Gawker permanently? Here is the shortest list we could compile of who else, apart from Peter Thiel, could possibly be funding the Hulk Hogan trial against Gawker. We’ve sent queries to each of their reps and will update this post if and when we receive any reply: 
 
 1. Peter Thiel 
 
 PayPal and Palantir co-founder, Founders Fund partner, worth $2.7 billion 
 
 The man of the hour. Thiel, as Forbes points out in its story revealing him as Hulk Hogan’s silent benefactor, truly despises Gawker. The PayPal co-founder and ardent libertarian once said that he thought Valleywag reporters should be “described as terrorists, not writers or reporters.” Why’s that? Well, the site wrote about his sexuality; his funding of goon-cum-provocateur James O’Keefe; the ill-fortunes of Clarium Capital, Thiel’s hedge fund; and his bizarre comments on democracy, freedom, and women’s’ suffrage. But we know, or all but know, that Thiel is funding Hogan’s lawsuit, so let’s look at some other likely candidates. 
 
 2. Sean Parker 
 
 Entrepreneur and investor, worth $2.4 billion 
 
 Sean Parker, who famously founded Napster and then went on to become president of Facebook, like Thiel, has been hounded by Gawker journalists for certain aspects of his personal life. Actually just one big aspect: his 2013 wedding, or as Valleywag referred to it, “his eco-fuck wedding” which was “tackier than we ever dreamt.” Valleywag devoted a dozen posts to Parker’s cosplay wedding held in an ancient redwood forest in California’s Big Sur, detailing the damage wrought by the festivities. It reported on Parker’s $2.5 million in fines for not getting necessary permits and the requirement that he build an environmental protection app for California. 
 
 When Sean Parker wrote a post for TechCrunch complaining that he’d been media-lynched and libeled by “inaccurate, derivative stories” without “fact checking or sourcing,” Valleywag’s Sam Biddle called him “still an asshole 10,000 words later.” It’s fair to say that Parker might think a world without Gawker would be a better world. But a representative from the Parker Foundation says he’s not one of the benefactors behind the Gawker lawsuit. 
 
 “Thank you for checking in,” said a representative by email. “We can confirm that Sean Parker has played no role in litigation against Gawker.” 
 
 3. Mark Zuckerberg 
 
 Facebook founder and CEO, worth $51 billion 
 
 So Zuck and Thiel are definitely buds. Thiel was the first venture capitalist to funnel Zuckerberg some money to grow Facebook, and then Facebook went on to make Thiel even richer than he already was. But, surprisingly, Valleywag has treated Zuck relatively gently over the years, mostly concerning itself with his real estate decisions. Sure, it called him the “worst neighbor in San Francisco” regarding the unending construction on his Liberty Hill pied-a-terre, reported that he paid $30 million to buy his neighbors’ homes for privacy reasons, and revealed that he was “paying kids to squat in parking spots overnight,” but those are pretty gentle ribs compared to the other billies on this list. 
 
 There were hard-hitting pieces about Zuckerberg by Nick Denton-paid journalists, but they were mainly on Gawker central in a period during which Valleywag was on hiatus. As a kind of revenge on Facebook for stealing the world’s privacy, then Gawker writer Ryan Tate hired a journalist to stalk Zuck for a weekend. Tate also posted a bunch of Zuckerberg’s private Facebook photos. Gawker has certainly been a bee in Facebook’s bonnet over the years, most recently with Gawker-owned Gizmodo accusing the site of anti-conservative bias in its news section, but it’s hard to imagine this being enough to motivate Mark Zuckerberg to join an anti-Gawker cabal. 
 
 4. Vinod Khosla 
 
 Sun Microsystems founder, longtime Kleiner Perkins partner, worth 1.51 billion 
 
 Vinod Khosla, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems in the 80s, also spent two decades at big time venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and has had his own firm —Khosla Ventures— since 2004. He’s also been in Gawker and Valleywag’s crosshairs for a decade. In Valleywag’s initial incarnation he came under scrutiny for his investment in ethanol, and especially in ethanol companies that used slave labor…with his approval. 
 
 More recently, the site assiduously covered Khosla’s transformation into a living avatar of the Bay Area’s ultra-wealthy using money to skirt the law and co-opt public space. When Khosla bought beach property in Half-Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, he closed the only public-access road to the rest of the beach. Valleywag and Gawker have kept on this story, including Khosla’s recent request that the public pay $30 million for use of the beach, as well as Khosla’s other gentrification adventures and an attempt by a former-employee to extort money. In other words there’s no love lost between Khosla and Gawker, and the former both likes his secrecy and has a $1.51 billion net worth to dig help fund a lawsuit against the latter. 
 
 5. Jack Dorsey 
 
 Twitter and Square founder and CEO, worth $1.03 billion 
 
 Jack Dorsey is only just in the billies club so might not want to be throwing his money at lawyers to secretly bankrupt a blog. But he has been treated pretty roughly by the Valleywag crew. Valleywag has called the engineer-entrepreneur a “sociopath” and one of the “creepiest [guys] in Startupland,” who “is known for betraying everyone close to him.” Sam Biddle detailed how “he screwed over all his friends at Twitter” and mocked him for his “frightening” selfies. Worst of all, Valleywag dug up poetry Dorsey wrote in his younger, angstier days that he had posted to the internet and since deleted. That’s pretty much the worst thing you can do to someone, so Dorsey must surely still hold a grudge. 
 
 6. Marc Andreessen 
 
 Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz founder, worth $600 million 
 
 Venture capitalist Andreessen and his distinctively-shaped head have been frequent targets of criticism from the tech press while receiving soothing adulation from others. But Valleywag raised needling the Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz founder to a sort of art. They mocked him on his absurd ideas about meritocracy, called out his shitty beliefs about Edward Snowden, highlighted his critics, were agog at his weird thoughts on the poor (delivered via Tweetstorm, of course), wrote about his father-in-law’s misdeeds, reported on his bad behavior personal and fiduciary, and mocked his (awful) social media venture, Ning. 
 
 Honestly, perusing Gawker and Valleywag’s stories on Andreessen is effectively the same as reading a catalog of Andreessen’s screw-ups. In a brief 2014 New York profile of Valleywag’s then-editor, Sam Biddle, Andreessen is quoted from Twitter as calling Biddle’s stories “flatly incorrect.” While his mere $600 million net worth makes Andreessen a slightly less wealthy financier than some others on this list, he more than makes up for it in his hatred of Gawker. 
 
 Oh, by the way, here are a couple of Andreessen’s latest tweets: 
 
 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/735022458038685696 
 
 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/735551069594357764 
 
 7. Marissa Mayer 
 
 Yahoo! CEO and former Google exec, worth $380 million 
 
 Mayer is a bit of a dark horse candidate to be a Hogan backer. For one thing, she has less money to throw away on funding other people’s expensive lawsuits. She’s also the CEO of Yahoo!, which has a sizeable journalistic division, which’d make it a very odd look for her. (Though, then again, Thiel was a supporter of The Committee to Protect Journalists). 
 
 In terms of motivation, though, there’s plenty to go on. Valleywag covered Mayer a lot, dating back to the site’s inception when Mayer was still a Google executive. And I do mean a lot: they mocked the proliferation of profiles of Mayer; covered her admitting mistakes with Google Video; posted goofy photos of her; undermined her talking points; and Gawker Media owner Nick Denton himself wrote about her relationship with Google co-founder Larry Page, as did other Valleywag writers. That was all just in the site’s first year. Valleywag’s coverage of her time as Yahoo CEO was equally sharp, including a history of the company screwing up things it bought, and the absurdity of Yahoo events. Still a dark horse, but one worth considering. 
 
 8. Travis Kalanick 
 
 Uber founder, worth $6 billion 
 
 Peter Thiel may have called Uber the “most ethically challenged” company in Silicon Valley, but that’s probably because he’s an investor in Uber competitor Lyft. In truth, Kalanick and Thiel are cut from the same, Objectivist cloth. Other than hardline Libertarianism and a love of Ayn Rand, they also share the designation of being among Gawker’s most hated men in Silicon Valley. Since Uber’s founding in 2009, Valleywag reporters have chronicled with gusto every misstep of both Uber and its CEO, portraying Uber as an unethical, money-hungry behemoth run by a crass sociopath. Gawker has called Kalanick an “asshole,” a “reviled CEO,” and a “sadist” and called Uber “the most hated company” in America. “When you have an unapologetic asshole for a CEO, your company does things like this,” Sam Biddle wrote in 2014 when Uber and Lyft were in the midst of a turf war. We already know Kalanick isn’t a huge fan of aggressive journalists, so it’s not a stretch to imagine he’s in cahoots to take down Gawker alongside Thiel. 
 
 But an Uber spokesperson says it’s not the case. “Travis has not funded any litigation,” said the spokesperson by email. 
 
 9. Ben Horowitz 
 
 Venture capitalist, worth $500 million 
 
 Over the past few years, Ben Horowitz and Peter Thiel have both solidified their place among the ranks of Silicon Valley self-help gurus, with their respective books, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” and “Zero to One,” earning them ridicule from the writers at Gawker. (The two men are also fans of each other’s wisdom, often quoting each other when dispensing with this advice giving.) But Horowitz’s love of hip hop and black culture has earned him the most biting critique from Gawker, its writers painting the Andreessen Horowitz VC as a desperate poser just trying to look cool. “Like anyone sinking into the quicksand of try-hard desperation, Horowitz manages to make it worse by failing,” Sam Biddle wrote in 2014, when he took the stage with the rapper Nas at South by Southwest. “Ben Horowitz, says Ben Horowitz, is the personification of cool black youth culture. Venture capital is the new rap.” Yikes. 
 
 10. Elon Musk 
 
 Founder of SpaceX + Tesla, worth $12.3 billion 
 
 Elon Musk and Peter Thiel go way back: their billions spring from their days together as part of the PayPal Mafia. Since then, Thiel has continued to fawn over Musk in public, last year telling a crowd that Musk was the most impressive PayPal Mafia member. Their camaraderie, we’re guessing, extends to a mutual hatred of Gawker. The site has poked plenty of fun at Musk’s personal life, pointing out that his once receding hairline has vanished, that he seems to have trouble staying married and calling Musk a “psychopath” for revealing he and his fellow PayPal Mafia members built bombs for kicks in high school. But we imagine Gawker’s skeptical coverage of Musk’s fantastical business aspirations is more cutting for Musk. “We love Elon Musk’s nutso determination,” Sam Biddle wrote when Musk unveiled plans for the Hyperloop back in 2013, “There was certainly a time when electric cars and private space flight seemed silly, too. But what’s sillier is treating this as anything other than a very rich man’s wild imagination.” Burn. 
 
 11, Sheryl Sandberg 
 
 COO of Facebook, worth $1.35 billion 
 
 Valleywag hasn’t done any recent takedowns of Facebook’s #2-in-command, mostly saving its ire for her best-selling tome Lean In, which horrified Valleywag with its suggestion that doing laundry is the best foreplay for sex. But back in 2008, when she was still at Google, Sandberg reportedly said she “wanted to shoot the guy who writes Valleywag.” In those days, Valleywag called Sandberg a “clumsy liar,” detailed what her Google colleagues didn’t like about her, and described her management at Facebook as a “reign of terror.” More recently, Sam Biddle has gently mocked Sandberg when she celebrated the fact that she and her family did not get on a flight that later crash-landed, suggested she was up to something shady in closed-door meetings with the FTC in D.C., and shamed the billionaire for putting up an ad for an unpaid intern. But is it enough to drive her to help kill the site through revenge litigation? 
 
 12. Jeff Bezos 
 
 Amazon CEO and owner of The Washington Post, worth $59.1 billion 
 
 Bezos has come under plenty of scrutiny over the years at Valleywag, not least over the notoriously harsh workplace culture at Amazon and its aggressive strategies in undercutting almost every retail market it has waded into. “Has Jeff Bezos lost his mind?,” the site enquired over Bezos’ apparently manic disregard for a lack of company profits. Why does he hover near the top of a list of least generous philanthropists despite his incredible wealth? “Inside Amazon’s Kafkaesque ‘Performance Improvement Plans‘” exposed punitive review practices which left employees fearing for their jobs. After documenting so many similar stories, Valleywag concluded that Amazon deserves all its bad PR. On top of which, Jeff Bezos is incredibly creepy at breakfast: “Holy fuck!,” wrote Sam Biddle. “This guy will probably end up controlling the entire publishing industry and possibly the entirety of retail. Who’s hungry?” 
 
 Is this enough to make Bezos angry? Possibly! Though it would be a very bad look for a newspaper owner to attempt to silence a competitor in this way. Plus he seems much happier sinking his billions of dollars into his private plans to reach space. 
 
 13. Sergey Brin 
 
 Google cofounder, worth $37.6 billion 
 
 Google has received so much negative coverage from Valleywag that we had to split it up among the founders to even the odds. The site was into Brin’s workplace sexy time misadventures for quite a while. Something else it deemed to be screwy was idiot accessory, Google Glass. Valleywag claimed that Google was extremely scared by Facebook and charged its private plane bills to the government. Sergey Brin has also been mocked for privately funding a cure for death while Google’s genetics outfit, 23andMe, was sued for being misleading, false and unscientific. 
 
 Angry enough to bankroll Hulk Hogan’s hurt feelings? Maybe! Having the media pry into your sex life is certainly embarrassing and something Brin and Hogan could no doubt comfort each other over while rolling on a pile of money. 
 
 14. Larry Page 
 
 Google cofounder, worth $29.2 billion 
 
 Larry Page is deep in the billionaire’s space camp crew, telling everyone that he’d like to leave his billions to go with Elon Musk’s billions so that rich people can get to Mars once we’ve ruined Earth. Valleywag has paid close attention to Google biz practices. It reported that “Larry and Sergey’s greed-shot to control Google stock paid off” and that Google had Congressmen in its pocket. Stories detailing how the company misclassified employees as independent contractors, and how intensely horrible it is to be black and a woman at Google did not paint the giant corporation in a flattering light. Neither did knowing that Google (and Facebook) had funded climate change deniers before withdrawing their support amid howls of outrage. Is this enough to raise Page’s rage? He is tight with Elon Musk, who was once tight with Peter Thiel and they are all really into Star Wars, so let’s go with a firm maybe. 
 
 15. Eric Schmidt 
 
 Alphabet executive chairman, worth $9 billion 
 
 Valleywag comes out strong in its continued perusal of Google (sorry, Alphabet) with plenty of big hits against its privacy-hating executive chairman. Valleywag reveals that Schmidt enjoys posting pictures of the ladies to Instagram, perhaps from evenings spent enjoying one of his enormous houses. Schmidt asks the public to believe that Google is not a monopoly despite convincing proof of the opposite. Remember Google Plus? Schmidt has also gotten very personally involved with his employees’ work at the company but probably not the extent that it warrants a 100 million dollar salary bump, though that secret deal for cheap jet fuel probably saved a few bucks. 
 
 HULK SMASH? It seems unlikely that someone who thinks that privacy no longer exists and who needs it anyway would litigate on behalf on someone charging invasion of privacy. Buck up, boyyo! PRIVACY IS DEAD. But, it is mortifying when people dig up our digital graves and scatter the entrails all over the internet, so, this is a perhaps. 
 
 🙀🙀🙀 
 
 In summary, Valleywag was, and Gawker still is, a major shit-stirrer that has made many rich enemies over the years. Beyond Valleywag, Gawker properties famously got their hands on an iPhone prototype, narrowly avoiding criminal charges, and turned off all the TVs at the Consumer Electronics Show. Gawker has no shortage of enemies, but also many fans. We will update this post with any responses we receive from these particular likely enemies of the blog.
– The founder of PayPal has long made clear that he hates Gawker. Now Forbes reports that Peter Thiel is using his billions to fund a potentially devastating legal fight against the media group. Specifically, the report says Thiel has been secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuits against Gawker over the publication of a sex tape featuring the wrestler. A jury awarded Hogan $140 million in one case, though Gawker is appealing, and Hogan has another suit in the works. Gawker chief Nick Denton had told the New York Times earlier this week that he suspected a third party was funding Hogan's fight, though he didn't name Thiel publicly. As both stories note, Gawker (via its now-shuttered Valleywag site) outed the then-closeted Thiel as gay in 2007, and Thiel subsequently likened the website to al-Qaeda. "I think they should be described as terrorists, not as writers or reporters," he told Reuters in 2009, per the Washington Post. The revelation would answer one question that has baffled legal observers: Why didn't Hogan try to settle his suit rather than risk a trial? Thiel's involvement would suggest that it's more about hurting Gawker than coming to any kind of legal settlement, notes recode.