Peter Thiel vs. Gawker: The Flame War’s Logical Conclusion
But once those tempers and grudges move out to Silicon Valley, a surprising revelation surfaces: If anything, someone like Thiel funding a lawsuit just to “disrupt” a news site he hates feels more like the kind of abuse associated with Internet trolling than it does like hedge fund opportunism.
.. Thiel’s vengeance is not that much different from our own, workaday version—he just has a lot more money to spend on it.
.. Thiel told the Times. “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.” It’s the kind of sentiment you might hear on Reddit or 4chan as a justification for a vigilante operation.