The evolution of Mr Thiel

PETER THIEL is no stranger to the limelight. He is arguably the world’s most successful technology investor, as a co-founder of PayPal, the first outside investor in Facebook and the eminence behind a dozen or so Silicon Valley startups. The self-proclaimed libertarian has used his fortune to fund a wide variety of idiosyncratic causes such as establishing private islands outside government control, paying young people to start firms instead of going to university and waging war on death. Mr Thiel is lampooned in HBO’s “Silicon Valley”, a brilliantly observed television-comedy series, and portrayed briefly in “The Social Network”, a film about Mark Zuckerberg.

Yet even by Mr Thiel’s standards the past fortnight has been a remarkable one. He has admitted secretly funding Hulk Hogan, a professional wrestler (whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea), in his lawsuit against Gawker, a scurrilous website, for invading his privacy by publishing a sex tape. Mr Bollea is one of several beneficiaries of Mr Thiel’s legal largesse. In 2007 Gawker’s Valleywag blog published a piece entitled “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people”. Since his outing Mr Thiel, who clearly thinks revenge is a dish best served cold, has secretly funded a team of lawyers to find “victims” of Gawker and help them bring cases against the website.