I remember only that it was perfectly polite, and that whatever else he may have been thinking, Thiel had agreed to have that cup of coffee. (“Just manners,” he explained.) He did show me what Thiel had written, but would not let me copy it down. “I’m not going to share that with you,” he told me, at least not without getting Thiel’s permission. He then read me Thiel’s response: “Nick, I’m not sure that a political conversation would be that constructive, but. “Let me know if there’s a conversation to be had.” He closed with “Regards, Nick.” It was such stories that had led Thiel, in 2009, to label Valleywag “the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda” and to liken its writers to terrorists. Both before and after that, Valleywag and Gawker had continued to ridicule Thiel, his investment decisions, his ideas, and his friends. “Does Nick Denton wish he were Peter Thiel?” a headline on Denton’s own once asked.īut, in 2007, Gawker’s Silicon Valley tributary, Valleywag, had outed Thiel, or at least Thiel thought it had. “Nauseatingly successful” was how Denton once described him. Both were wealthy still in 2014, though as winner of one of Silicon Valley’s greatest daily doubles-he co-founded PayPal and was Facebook’s first big investor-Thiel was exponentially more so, a fact that stuck in the ultra-competitive Denton’s craw. Both have resisted getting old, Denton by attitude, Thiel through human growth hormones. Both are libertarians, and nonconformists, and visionaries, and science-fiction fans, and workaholics, and wonks. Both are gay, and both came out relatively late. Both made their fortunes in the digital world in fact, it had brought them together in San Francisco a dozen or so years earlier. Both graduated from fancy universities-Denton from Oxford and Thiel from Stanford.
Both were born in Europe-Denton in England and Thiel in Germany. They are contemporaries: Denton turned 50 this past August, and Thiel 49 two months later. It could easily have been a message to a friend, or at least a kindred spirit, for, as many people who know them both have noted, the two have so much in common. One day in September 2014 the publisher of Gawker Media, Nick Denton, sent an e-mail to Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and billionaire.
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