Conspiracy
Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue
(Sprache: Englisch)
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...
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...
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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
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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.
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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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
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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, u
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, u
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Autoren-Porträt von Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday is one of the world s bestselling living philosophers. His 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, appear in more than forty languages and have sold over 10 million copies. 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 Street in Bastrop, Texas.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Ryan Holiday
- 2018, 336 Seiten, Maße: 16,7 x 23,8 cm, Gebunden, Englisch
- Verlag: Portfolio
- ISBN-10: 0735217645
- ISBN-13: 9780735217645
- Erscheinungsdatum: 06.07.2018
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
...a profound masterwork by a talented young writer...one helluva page-turner" The New York TimesIn 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
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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
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