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 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.
