This is an excerpt from Ryan Holiday’s new book Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue , available now .</ em>
Peter Thiel’s vague mind to do something about Gawker , the website that had outed him as gay in 2007, was concretized into conspiracy on April 6, 2011. It began unremarkably, when Thiel traveled to Germany to speak at a meeting and had dinner with a student he’d fulfilled on a tour of colleges and universities a few years before. Peter arrives, driven in a black S-class Mercedes, the same modeling he has idling outside with a driver, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, wherever he is in the world. From the hotel emerges a short, fit young man of indiscernible descent. Aside from his Ivy League education, the young man has at this degree reached next to nothing. But Peter attracts these types — mainly men early in their potentially ascendant careers — and puts them to good apply: investing in them, making them advice, placing them in start-ups, allocating them important roles in his functionings. This specific young man in Berlin, we shall refer to as Mr. A, the pseudonym that almost everyone involved in the conspiracy refers to him by.
Mr. A is not just young but likewise ambitious, ambitious in a way that attains commentators slightly uncomfortable, that stimulates him stand out even among the cadre of upstarts in Peter’s orbit. It’s not fame he craves, or fund either, or even to create the next big tech company. He read Machiavelli at thirteen. He’s fascinated by power and knows that Peter is a means by which he can wield it.
There is a scene in the movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford . At the beginning, in the woods, Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck, represents this phenomenon. He thinks the outlawed Jesse James is a great man. He thinks that he, himself, is a great boy, too. He wants someone to recognize that in him. He craves someone to give him an opportunity–a project through which he can prove his worth. It merely happens that Frank James would size the young man up in the timbers outside Blue Cut, Missouri: “You don’t have the ingredients, son.”
In contrast, Mr. A is ambitious, but it’s paired with self-confidence, social adeptness, and a clear sense of what Thiel wanted. Even so, future prospects of meeting with Thiel is intimidating: his stomach churning, every nerve and synapse alive and howling. He’s twenty-six years old. He’s sitting down for a one-on-one evening with a boy worth, by 2011, some $1.5 billion and who owns a significant chunk of the biggest social network in the world, on whose board of directors he also sits. Even if Thiel were just an ordinary investor, dinner with him would make anyone nervous. One rapidly finds that this is a man notoriously averse to small talk, or what a friend once deemed “casual bar talk.” Even the most perfunctory commentary to Thiel can elicit long, deep pauses of consideration with a view to responding — so long you wonder if you’ve said something monumentally stupid. The tiny assumptions that grease the wheels of dialogue find no quarter with Thiel. There is no chatting with Peter about the climate or about politics in general. It’s got to be: “I’ve been studying opening moves in chess, and I envision king’s pawn might be the best one.” Or, “What do you think of the bubble in higher education? ” And then you have to be prepared to talk about it at the expert level for hours on end. You can’t talking here television or music or pop culture because the person you’re sitting across from doesn’t care about these things and he couldn’t pretend to be familiar with them if he wanted to.
They are seated to dinner at Restaurant Tim Raue promptly at 8: 00 p.m. A reservation has been called ahead, a good table secured, in a restaurant that has hosted Obama, Merkel, and other world leaders. This was Berlin , not far from Checkpoint Charlie, but it could have been New York, Los Angeles, London, Brussels, Tokyo. It’s quiet, filled with the kind of global elites who need to know that wherever you are in the world you get your two-Michelin-star-quality sauteed brussels sprouts and pork belly. Feigning confidence, Mr. A glimpses at the menu and orders the eight-course savor menu. Peter beckoned the sommelier over to order wine. He asked what kind of wine Mr. A likes. Hearing Riesling, he makes his request: “We’ll have a bottle of this one.” It’s the second most expensive Riesling on the menu.
The butterflies settle. The dialogue has wound itself down naturally and now there is nothing left but for Mr. A to confiscate the moment. This minute that few get. The chance for a pitching that can change their own lives. There is something popular with ambitious people called the “briefcase technique.” You don’t show up to a meeting with a few vague ideas, you have a full-fledged programme that you take out of your proverbial briefcase and hand to the person you are pitching. Even if nothing comes of these action plans, the person on the other side is knocked over by your effort, so impressed by the unexpected certainty that they cannot help but see your usefulness to them. Mr. A unlocks that gurative briefcase on the table: “Okay, I know what you think about Gawker , here’s what I am proposing…”
Thiel had spoken about Gawker many times. He had spoken about it in interviews, he had complained about it to pals. It had come up in passing in dialogue when Mr. A and Thiel had first met a few years before. Now sitting at this table in the town that birthed hundreds of thousands of Cold War plots and counterplots, he finds that first successful return of those many trial balloons. Ambition and opportunity have collided and the kid in front of him is proposing a solution to that trouble that Thiel has set upon trying to solve: Peter should create a shell company to hire former investigative reporters and lawyers to find causes of action against Gawker . Gawker has written thousands of articles about thousands of people; it must have made a mistake somewhere. Mr. A’s proposal is more than just an idea, it’s a comprehensive, structured program: he has researched some epithets, he had a timeline and a budget.
Three to five years and $10 million .</ em>
Peter answers with one of his customary pauses. The silence hangs there, one second, two seconds, ten seconds, and like so many others before, Mr. A meditates if this suggestion is crazy, if he has blown his chance. And then Peter begins to talk, interrupts himself as he does, as if he still needs time to decide his own guess, and then recur the words he has been told by so many others, so many times–that there was nothing that could be done. Has Peter come to believe this? Is he testing the young man before him?
Here is where the desire and naivete of youth are so powerful. Mr. A responded with terms that would be almost absurd for someone of his age, someone who in fact knew little about “the worlds” except from what he had read and learned in school. Except he was right and the words he spoke were the type a human like Thiel could not resist.
“Peter, if everyone thought that route, what the fuck is “the worlds” definitely sounds like? ”
“Just hearing that was so refreshing, ” Peter would tell me when I interviewed him. “Because of course what you always heard was these incremental things that wouldn’t quite do it.” Yet Gawker is hardly a pressing issue in 2011. Valleywag , the site that had written about Peter, has been temporarily shuttered. Mr. A is then in the position of persuading the healthy boy how bad it is to be sick. He picks a seductive angle for Thiel then. He isn’t talking about defense–not simply righting a incorrect that had been done to him, or insulating his own business against person with a grudge–but something that seems more noble and inspiring than that. It is more than the servant whispering to Darius, “Master, remember the Athenians.”
Peter, think about all the people they’ve injure. It’s going to keep happening .</ em>
It’s simply going to get worse.
If you–the billionaire–can’t do something about this, who can ?</ em>
And what would follow would be Thiel’s attempt to prove that conventional wisdom wrong. It would take another virtually five years, cost above the projected $10 million, and in the end involve the FBI, the Tampa Bay Police Department, the 1st and 4th Amendments, the wrestler Hulk Hogan, the alt-right, Gamergate, a $140 million dollar judgment in a Florida courtroom and, eventually, the President of the United States of America.
It’s an insane, virtually unbelievable tale. Not a conspiracy theory but an actual conspiracy.
One we’re only just beginning to understand.
Read more: https :// techcrunch.com/ 2018/03/ 01/ the-dinner-that-destroyed-gawker /~ ATAGEND
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