Iconic pro-wrestler and MAGA supporter Hulk Hogan (aka Terry Gene Bollea) died today at the age of 71, amid reports of a possible heart attack. While many remember Bollea for his wrestling persona and his support of the current president at the 2024 Republican National Convention, he is also infamous for helping gay conservative billionaire Peter Thiel bankrupt the gay-owned Gawker blogging empire after Gawker outed Thiel and published a leaked video of Bollea having sex with a married woman and using racist and homophobic slurs.

In 2007, Gawker — owned by gay then-CEO Nick Denton — published an article outing Thiel, entitled, “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” Then, in 2012, the publication shared clips from a leaked sex video (recorded in 2007) which showed Hogan repeatedly using the N-word to express disgust over his daughter dating a Black man and using a homophobic slur to describe another man as “a big f*g,”

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Then, nine years later (in 2016), Thiel admitted that he had provided over $10 million to support Bollea’s lawsuit against Gawker, alleging that Gawker had violated the wrestler’s privacy.

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At the time, Thiel said in interviews and op-eds that his outing by the gossip website was “minor in comparison with the cruelties that could be inflicted by someone willing to exploit the internet without moral limits” and claimed that his funding of Bollea’s lawsuit was “less about revenge and more about specific deterrence.”

In a 2016 open letter, Denton noted that Thiel, who made millions by investing in Facebook and PayPal, may have worried that the outing would harm his personal life and relationships with anti-gay investors in Saudi Arabia.

“Your revenge has been served well, cold and (until now) anonymously,” Denton wrote. “You admit you have been planning the punishment of Gawker and its writers for years, and that you have so far spent $10 million to fund litigation against the company.”

A jury disagreed with Gawker‘s assertion that Bollea’s personal sex tape was of public interest because of the wrestler’s celebrity status. The jury then ordered Gawker to pay $140 million in damages. Shortly after the jury’s decision, the blogging company filed for bankruptcy and put itself up for auction. Many of its related websites have since been shut down or acquired and are now operated by various companies.

Denton noted that Thiel not only went after Gawker but also its individual journalists, including A.J. Daulerio, author of the 2012 sex video story, who was initially unable to pay the $100,000 in punitive damages awarded by the jury; journalist Sam Biddle (who Thiel’s lawsuit accused of being an abuser of narcotics, based on Biddle’s own writing about his struggles with physician-prescribed medications to treat his anxiety and depression), and then-executive editor John Cook, who was accused of negligent hiring and retention.

Denton accused Thiel of redefining himself as a “thin-skinned billionaire” and “comic-book villain” who helped reduce the amount of public scrutiny over the “billionaire class, the accumulation of wealth in Silicon Valley, and technology’s influence over the media.”

Nine years after the lawsuit, Thiel has used his billions to help support the current presidential regime. Billionaire Amazon-owner Jeff Bezos now owns The Washington Post, too, and is arguably using his influence to make the publication more sympathetic to billionaires and conservatives who aid them.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk now owns the large social media platform X (previously Twitter) and has used litigation to bully watchdog organizations and advertisers who don’t want their content to appear next to the website’s proliferating neo-Nazi hate speech. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated $1 million to the current president’s inauguration fund while rolling back moderation and fact-checking that once helped restrain the real-world harm caused by the president’s conspiracy theories and lies.

Many mainstream publications have been cowed — under legal threats from the current presidential administration — from accurately describing the president’s numerous illegal, unconstitutional, and corrupt actions… including his many moves to de-regulate artificial intelligence (allowing it to train its limited language models on stolen writing and artworks while outputting “anti-woke” responses to user questions) and also the cryptocurrency industry, from which the president stands to make hundreds of millions.

In short, Gawker may have overstepped its right to report on Bollea’s sex tape, but the sort of oversight that Gawker helped exercise over tech billionaires is needed now more than ever.

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