Gawker owner net worth12/24/2023 “Peter Thiel is now one of the most powerful people in the country. He said that at one point Gawker’s legal costs were running at about $1m a month.ĭenton said it was “lucky timing” that he had settled the Hulk Hogan lawsuit a week before the 2016 election. He cited Thiel’s own words justifying his support of the Hogan lawsuit: “If you’re a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system,” Thiel said at the National Press Club in Washington in October.ĭenton said: “Maybe you need to be a billionaire to get justice, as long as the legal process is convoluted and extremely expensive.” “There will be no drama, you’ll just see no advertising from Samsung for the next few years and the salaries of 10 journalists go up in smoke for one story.”ĭenton argued that the concentration of power and wealth was also skewing the justice system. “An honest review of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is a dangerous and expensive proposition,” he said, alluding to the defective phone recalled after explosions. It’s not just billionaires and celebrities who wield this power over the media, but advertisers, he continued. “So if we’re talking about freedom of expression, profitability has to be at the center of that.” “The balance of power has shifted dramatically,” Denton said. Thiel alone possesses a comparable market cap to that of the New York Times, with a net worth estimated to be $2.7bn, while the New York Times’ current market capitalization is $2.35bn. “Now you have monopoly profits of companies, like Facebook, funding the fortunes of billionaires, like Peter Thiel, and the media, by comparison, is financially outmatched,” he said. He said the media had been strong until the late 20th century because there was a lucrative classified advertising revenue stream, which meant subjects of the stories were rarely more powerful than the media companies covering them. Thiel could become a scapegoat of the current political tensions in the US, he said.īut Thiel remains a threat to freedom of the press, Denton added. “You punish the scapegoat and it’s a cathartic moment and society can move on,” Denton explained, arguing that Gawker became the scapegoat for people’s tendency to gossip. When a buildup of conflict threatens to destroy the parties involved, a scapegoat is used to return to balance. Girard’s central idea is “mimetic theory”, which posits that most human behaviour is based on imitation and that the imitation of desires leads to conflict. This is particularly ironic, Denton said, given Thiel’s obsession with the philosopher René Girard. “If there was ever a political backlash against this moment, he has made himself very exposed,” he said. “He has become extremely prominent and an avatar, an embodiment, of the merger of the reactionary elite with a kind of populist celebrity in Donald Trump. “Peter Thiel, through his financial support of litigation and his support for political disruption through Donald Trump, has become a national figure,” Denton said at an event at at SXSW on Sunday.
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