Peter Thiel on Gawker's Takedown and the Slow Funeral of Liberalism

Peter Thiel tells Ann Coulter the full story of how he secretly funded the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker, then argues that universities and liberalism are dying. The interview aired in two parts on Coulter’s show UNSAFE in April 2024: Part 1, on bringing down Gawker (43 minutes), and Part 2, on liberalism’s slow funeral (37 minutes). Together they make about 80 minutes of Thiel explaining how he thinks about power, secrecy, credentials and the crowd.

TLDW

Part 1 is the inside story of the Hulk Hogan case. Thiel describes the hidden law firm, the decision never to sue for libel, the Nick Denton deposition, the trial tactics, the $140 million verdict, and the UK shell company that led to Hogan’s $31 million settlement. Part 2 moves to the universities, which Thiel compares to the Catholic Church on the eve of the Reformation. He makes the case that credentials work as a slow-motion scam, that liberal academics were hurt by academic ideology more than conservatives were, and that liberalism is now a “zombie” whose funeral will not end. It closes on his favorite interview question, the courage it takes to answer it, and his view of globalization as the biggest bubble of all.

Thoughts

The sharpest idea in the whole 80 minutes is almost a throwaway. Thiel says you “can maybe get away with more than you think” in a world where people call everything a crazy conspiracy theory. His operation survived a legal blog post asking whether a secret Gawker hater was funding Hogan, rumors around Tampa, and a dinner guest who worked the whole thing out, because the true explanation sounded paranoid. A Reddit thread shamed the writer for peddling conspiracy theories. If Denton had told an all-hands meeting that a billionaire was out to destroy the company, he would have sounded unhinged. That works in both directions. The reflex that protected a campaign Thiel sees as justice would protect one nobody would defend. The interview never puts to him the objection that dominated coverage in 2016: quietly bankrolling lawsuits until a publication dies is a weapon anyone with money and a grudge can pick up. Coulter’s aside, “I hope no liberal is watching this,” gets only his reply that they already do it all the time.

Thiel’s famous hiring question, here phrased as “What is it you believe to be true that most people do not?”, gets its best treatment late in Part 2. He argues the question still works when you know it is coming, because answering it takes courage, not brilliance, and courage is in shorter supply. Then he takes it a step further: an answer he hears over and over is probably not heterodox, so it is probably wrong. The one he hears most is that genetics matter more than anyone admits. His counter is clever. If liberals run the schools and the schools do not work, outcomes will look entirely genetic, so the belief may partly be a symptom of failed education. Coulter pushes back with twin studies, and he does not concede. He just says it is a bad answer because so many people agree with it. It is the one real disagreement between two people who agree on almost everything else, and it shows the test working: a contrarian view that has become the consensus among contrarians is just another crowd.

His case against higher education is strongest when it is about time, not ideology. A scheme that promises a fortune in six months blows up fast. One that promises success in 20 years outlasts the victims’ ability to complain, and by then they blame their own choices. He pairs this with an argument he calls Marxist: professors have been “proletarianized.” A tenured Oxford professor who bought Tolkien’s old house at 4.5 million pounds should be investigated for where the money came from. Then comes the claim that liberals were hurt by academia more than conservatives were. Conservatives knew to stay away, while liberal white men believed saying the right things would get them tenure and ended up as lecturers fighting over one job for every ten applicants. You do not have to accept it, but it is an argument about the job market that can be checked, which is more than most attacks on universities offer.

The voting analogy near the end connects both episodes. Win 51 percent and you probably have a slightly better argument. Win 65 percent and it is a crushing one. Win 99.9 percent and “you’re in North Korea.” Thiel sets an Enlightenment faith in the wisdom of crowds against a Christian worry about the madness of crowds. He then runs through the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble and the education bubble, and ends on globalization as the largest, since it is groupthink that takes in the whole world. That is also his account of why Gawker could do so much damage between roughly 2002 and 2015: readers did not yet discount what they read. To his credit, he admits the limit himself: “Both of us are very good as critics of liberalism. We’re weaker as philosophers of the future.” When Coulter asks about Western Europe, he declines to talk about the future at all.

The moment that ties the two halves together comes early in Part 1. At the start, Thiel weighed two possibilities: suing a media company to death was hopeless, or everyone was too intimidated to try. Six months into the Hogan case, Denton’s deposition settled it. Had he ever appeared in a court of law? No. Had he ever been deposed? No. About 3,000 people had complained to Gawker, and Hogan’s team was the first to get as far as a deposition. Thiel calls Gawker a blowfish that puffed itself up to scare people off. It is the same point he makes about the contrarian question an hour later, applied to a lawsuit: the scarce resource was never cleverness, it was someone willing to keep going.

Key Takeaways

Thiel blames Gawker’s Valleywag site for helping turn a rumored feud with Sequoia Capital into a real one. He says it cost Founders Fund about $100 million in commitments in 2007 and pushed back the close of a fund that still raised $230 million.
His first idea was criminal: he met Manhattan defense lawyer Eddie Hayes, the model for the one good character in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Hayes turned out to be on Gawker’s payroll, and Thiel’s team started calling Gawker the “Manhattan-based terrorist organization.”
The operation was run by Aron D’Souza, an Australian law student Thiel met at Oxford, through an entity jokingly named the Australian Energy Company and a Los Angeles law firm that never knew who was paying.
The team deliberately never brought libel claims, so the rest of the media would not rally around Gawker. Instead they backed cases on labor law, a career destroyed by false allegations, and privacy.
Thiel frames the Hogan case as the First Amendment against a right to privacy he places in the Fifth Amendment. The search-and-seizure language he uses is actually the Fourth, and the Hogan verdict rested on Florida invasion-of-privacy claims.
About 3,000 people had complained to Gawker, but Hogan’s case was the first to reach a deposition of Nick Denton, who had never appeared in court or been deposed.
Gawker’s settlement offers rose from about $5 or 6 million to $11 million on the eve of trial, and the team had to keep Hogan from taking them, especially after WWE fired him in 2015 over a leaked recording.
The lawyers asked for $100 million. After seven hours the jury awarded $115 million plus $25 million in punitive damages, and Gawker, Denton and editor A.J. Daulerio all went bankrupt.
A late-night Google search for “Gawker UK” turned up Gawker Limited, a UK company set up in late 2014 that Thiel suspects was used to move about $10 million out of reach. It fell inside New York’s three-year bankruptcy look-back period, which Thiel says is why Gawker paid Hogan $31 million.
Thiel calls the universities as corrupt as the Catholic Church before the Reformation: “you go to Yale or you go to jail,” with student debt and tuition playing the part of indulgences. He expects reform to come from outside, through other credentials.
He pairs Claudine Gay’s exit from Harvard with Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s exit from Stanford over flawed neuroscience research, as the fraud of the humanities and the fraud of the sciences.
Thiel says he lasted seven months and three days at Sullivan & Cromwell. Of the firm, he says: “From the outside it was a place everybody wanted to get in. From the inside it was a place everybody wanted to get out.”
He says liberalism’s days are numbered, but it has become a “zombie liberalism,” an endless funeral its own mourners keep stretching out.
His closing intuition is that the bigger the consensus, the more dangerous the bubble, which makes globalization the worst form of groupthink.

Chapters

Part 1: Bringing Down Gawker (the video at the top of this post)

1:02 The Problem With Gawker

Coulter recalls a Christmas dinner where Thiel called Gawker’s writers terrorists, not journalists. Thiel describes a site that went after people who were not remotely public figures, and the collective action problem it relied on: complaining only invited more attacks, so everyone kept their head down and hoped it would move on.

5:34 A Defense Lawyer on the Other Side’s Payroll

Alexandra Wolfe introduces Thiel to Eddie Hayes, who tells him he does not look like a vengeful person and then admits he works for Gawker. Breakfasts with Gawker editor Choire Sicha confirm that nothing conventional will change Denton. Years later, at Oxford, Thiel meets the Australian law student who will run the operation.

9:32 The Hulk Hogan Case

From late 2012, a Los Angeles firm combs Gawker’s archive and contacts its targets. Hogan, real name Terry Bollea, was secretly filmed with his best friend’s wife, and he says he will fight to the end. Other cases go after unpaid wages and a ruined career, but never libel.

13:26 Depositions, a Blackmail Sting and a Leaked Tape

Denton’s 2013 deposition shows nobody had pushed this far before. In the background, lawyer Keith Davidson offers to sell Hogan the rest of the tape, which contains a racial slur. An FBI sting goes wrong, and the slur leaks to the National Enquirer just before the original trial date.

21:17 The Trial and the $140 Million Verdict

Judge Pamela Campbell presides in Hogan’s home territory. The team times A.J. Daulerio’s taped answer about which sex tapes he would not publish so the jury hears it just before lunch. The jury awards $115 million, then adds $25 million in punitive damages, and some jurors later say they would have given more.

24:53 The Getaway Car Called Gawker

Beside Gawker there was Kinja, a Hungarian affiliate, and a Cayman Islands holding company. A jet-lagged search in London turns up a fourth company, Gawker Limited, whose board includes Denton’s sister. Because it falls inside the bankruptcy look-back period, the creditors could have gone after it, and Hogan gets $31 million instead.

31:00 Bragging, Rumors and a Reddit Pile-On

Thiel admits he could not stop hinting, including a bet that Gawker would not exist in a year. A legal blog nearly works it out mid-trial, but Reddit mocks the writer for spreading conspiracy theories. When Forbes calls D’Souza, he says he does not want a subscription and hangs up.

38:32 Was Gawker Uniquely Evil?

Thiel admits that believing Gawker was uniquely evil kept him going and may have been “intentionally self-delusional.” His retrospective is that from about 2002 to 2015 the internet could destroy people because readers did not yet discount what they read. Today’s media is still deranged, he says, but everyone knows it.

Part 2: Liberalism’s Slow Funeral

0:00 Thirty Years of Being Right and Losing

Thiel’s pessimistic view is that his 1995 book The Diversity Myth got the details right and changed nothing. He recalls law professor Joseph Bankman, father of Sam Bankman-Fried, saying the school should hire no more white men. Thiel calls it a “secret handshake” in 1991 that later became real policy.

4:20 Universities as the Pre-Reformation Church

His optimistic view is that these institutions go bankrupt. Student debt, he says, has grown from $300 billion in 2000 to about $2 trillion. He sets the Gay and Tessier-Lavigne departures side by side and repeats the metaphor behind the Thiel Fellowship: reform of the church had to start from outside.

7:27 The Proletarianized Professor

Universities cost more every year while the job of a tenured professor gets worse: hard to get, not safe once you have it, and not enough to buy a house in Palo Alto or Oxford. Thiel argues academics blame ideology for what is really an institution that no longer works even for its own insiders.

10:24 Why Liberals Got Hurt More

COVID sped everything up, and the elite schools now work for nobody, liberal or conservative. Conservatives stopped pursuing PhDs in the 1990s because they knew they would not be hired. Liberal academics believed political correctness would protect them. A 2014 debate with David Graeber showed Thiel how angry the surplus of left-wing academics had become.

17:58 The 20-Year Scam and a Quarter-Life Crisis

A junior high yearbook predicted Stanford, and Thiel followed the track to Stanford Law and a top New York firm before having what he calls a quarter-life crisis. Back in California the internet was in the air, and PayPal started in 1998. He credits law school with giving him about the right amount of respect for lawyers.

25:43 The Funeral of Liberalism

Alternative credentials are the likely outside force, though medicine and research will reform slowly. Thiel says liberalism’s days are numbered but admits neither he nor Coulter can say what comes next. Liberals, he says, know the end is coming and keep adding ceremony to a funeral that has lasted decades.

28:11 The Question That Takes Courage

Coulter raises the Thiel Fellowship interview question and mentions that her book Demonic is dedicated to him. Thiel explains why the question survives being known in advance, why its real test is courage, and why the genetics answer he hears most often is probably wrong. Coulter cites twin studies and her Cornell professor Alvin Bernstein, who said courage is the most important quality in a friend.

33:26 Mass Insanity and the Globalization Bubble

Unanimity is a warning sign, not proof. Thiel moves from the dot-com, housing and education bubbles to globalization, and asks whether a unified world would be a rational end of history or a totalitarian state. Coulter ends on immigration, and he declines to forecast Western Europe.

Notable Quotes

“Maybe it’s just everyone’s too intimidated and nobody tries. Maybe it’s actually really possible to do this.”
Peter Thiel, on the second hypothesis behind the Gawker campaign (Part 1)

“You have a vanity plate on your getaway car that says getaway. If they had called it anything other than Gawker, we would have never figured this out.”
Peter Thiel, on finding Gawker Limited (Part 1)

“You can maybe get away with more than you think because in a world where people say that everything’s a crazy conspiracy theory, you are somewhat protected.”
Peter Thiel, on why the secret held for three years (Part 1)

“The universities are as corrupt as the Catholic Church on the eve of the Reformation.”
Peter Thiel, repeating the metaphor he used when starting the Thiel Fellowship in 2010 (Part 2)

“It’s a much more effective scam if it takes a long time.”
Peter Thiel, on the 20-year promise of an elite degree (Part 2)

“It’s not brilliance you need to answer the question. It’s courage. And we’re in a world where courage is in much shorter supply than brilliance.”
Peter Thiel, on his contrarian interview question (Part 2)

“If you get 60, 65% you must have a really crushing argument. If you get 99.9% you’re in North Korea.”
Peter Thiel, on why unanimity is a warning sign (Part 2)

Watch the full conversation in two parts: Part 1, Peter Thiel on Bringing Down Gawker, and Part 2, Peter Thiel on Liberalism’s Slow Funeral, from UNSAFE with Ann Coulter.

Peter Thiel on Gawker’s Takedown and the Slow Funeral of Liberalism