![]() "In a way very similar how a plaintiff's lawyer on contingency would do it." "Without going into all the details, we would get in touch with the plaintiffs who otherwise would have accepted a pittance for a settlement, and they were obviously quite happy to have this sort of support," he said. He said that he hired a legal team several years ago to look for cases that he could help financially support. Thiel is known as a brilliant entrepreneur, thanks largely to his role at PayPal, and also because of his lucrative investment in Facebook, where he is a board member, and for co-founding the secretive data-crunching startup Palantir. Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, who was also personally named in the Hogan suit, said in a statement: "Just because Peter Thiel is a Silicon Valley billionaire, his opinion does not trump our millions of readers who know us for routinely driving big news stories including Hillary Clinton's secret email account, Bill Cosby's history with women, the mayor of Toronto as a crack smoker, Tom Cruise's role within Scientology, the NFL cover-up of domestic abuse by players and just this month the hidden power of Facebook to determine the news you see." He funded a team of lawyers to find and help "victims" of the company's coverage to mount cases against Gawker. What the jury and the public did not know was that Bollea had a secret benefactor paying about $10 million for the lawsuit: Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and one of the earliest investors in Facebook.Ī 2007 article published by Gawker's Valleywag blog was headlined, "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people." That and a series of articles about his friends and others that he said "ruined people's lives for no reason" drove Thiel to mount a clandestine war against Gawker. That is the backstory to a legal case that had already grabbed headlines: The wrestler Hulk Hogan sued Gawker Media for invasion of privacy after it published a sex tape, and a Florida jury recently awarded the wrestler, whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea, $140 million. More power to him.Almost a decade after a billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur was outed as being gay by a media organisation, with his friends also suffering at the hands of the same gossip site, he secretly financed a lawsuit to try to put the media company out of business. That's why I think it's important to say this: Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world, is gay. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood That frees him or her to build a different, hopefully better system for identifying and rewarding talented individuals, and unleashing their work on the world. Like the immigrant Jews who created Hollywood a century ago, a gay investor has no way to fit into the old establishment. I think it explains a lot about Thiel: His disdain for convention, his quest to overturn established rules. And really: How many out gay VCs do you know? PlanetOut, the gay and lesbian portal, had to buy out Sequoia Capital, which had come to regret its investment in the company, before it found braver VCs and eventually went public. But gay and lesbian entrepreneurs I've spoken to agree it's real. VCs fund so few of the companies they talk to that it's hard to prove a case of discrimination there are a hundred reasons why they might pass on any given startup. At worst, it's prejudice with a handy alibi. At best, it's a wrongheaded sense of caution. They instinctively prefer entrepreneurs who remind them of themselves. ![]() The clubby ranks of VCs are mostly straight, white and male. (Even if, like me, you're gay yourself.) Yet as one venture capitalist put it, "The VC industry is headquartered in Menlo Park, not northern California." On Sand Hill Road, like funds like. Why would you mention that?" Here in northern California, where intolerance is the only thing we can't tolerate, even alluding to someone's sexual orientation is suspect. ![]() But someone else, somewhere else, might take issue with it. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Venture capital is a business about risk - but only the right kinds of risk. But what no one ever says out loud: Thiel is gay. We know about his mansion (he rents it - clever!), his butler, his early-morning jogs. There's been a crush of coverage on his $220 million Founders Fund, which may well change the way entrepreneurs get paid in the Valley. By now, you've likely heard how Peter Thiel parlayed a $500,000 investment in Facebook to a stake now worth $750 million. ![]()
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