It's Not Just Peter Thiel: 5 More Stories of Wealthy and Powerful Revenge

In 2007, I worked in a small newsroom in Chicago, where one of the reporters got in a fight with a guy he wrote a story about. Not a Twitter feud. Not a series of Facebook rants. An actual fist fight, on a Tuesday morning, in an office plaza just off Michigan Avenue. The guy who started the fight was a local blogger who wrote under a pseudonym, and the reporter had outed his true identity. It was all very absurd.

Peter Thiel, a billionaire tech investor, was outed in a much more serious way in 2007, when the Gawker blog Valleywag outed him as a gay man.

We now know that Thiel sought revenge, not by sucker-punching the writer, primarily by financing a lawsuit against the company, brought by the wrestler Hulk Hogan, which now threatens to put Gawker Media out of business.

Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and early Facebook investor, doesn't see it this way. "It's less about revenge and more about specific deterrence," he told The New York Times.

In the rich history of rich people, however, Thiel's revenge is relatively understated.

It's cold and methodical and deeply troubling, but not nearly as flashy as the revenge other members of society's upper class have taken on their enemies. Here are five such examples:

Middle Finger Statue

Alan Markovitz was a bit of a legend in Detroit, even before he built a statue of a middle finger directed at his ex-wife's house. Markowitz owns several strip clubs in Detroit and even wrote a book about it. Later in life, he bought the house next to his ex-wife and put up the bronze middle-finger statue, placing flood lights beneath it so the statue would be visible 24/7.

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Real-life Game of Thrones

Princess Olga ruled a region of Eastern Europe called Kievan Rus in the late 10th Century. A group called the Drevlians killed her husband, Igor of Kiev, and wanted her to remarry their prince. She refused and basically killed all of them. She buried some of them alive, set fire to a bathhouse full of Drevlians, and, in true Red Wedding style, invited them to a funeral feast, got them drunk, and then ordered her soldiers to kill more than 5,000 of them. She's now an actual saint.

Bulldozed

Last year, David Tepper completed an act of revenge that was decades in the making. In the 1990s, Tepper's boss at Goldman Sachs, Jon Corzine, who later became governor of New Jersey, passed him over for a promotion. Tepper left in 1993, started his own hedge fund, and ultimately became a billionaire, according to the New York Daily News. In 2010, Tepper bought Corzine's former home, bulldozed it, and built his own home over it. "You could say there was a little justice in the world," Tepper told New York magazine.

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David Tepper

Shoot the Messenger (Literally)

Until Richard Nixon's election in 1968, modern presidents more or less sought to woo the media. Not Nixon. He bullied, intimidated, and threatened journalists who wrote negative things about him. Members of his staff, The Altantic points out, even cooked up a plot to assassinate a columnist who angered Nixon by publishing embarrassing leaks.

President Trump?

Some people have suggested Donald Trump's run for president is a giant act of revenge against President Obama, who skewered Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011. "That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature within the political world," The New York Times writes. At the very least, the evening inspired Trump's foreign policy speech, which was more or less a giant "fuck you" to President Obama.