The “New Philanthropy”: What Peter Thiel’s bankrolling of lawsuits against Gawker may mean for the future of American media: PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel admitted in a widely-read interview with the New York Times on Wednesday that he financed wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against gossip site Gawker for releasing an intimate video of Hogan to the public. Thiel himself secretly underwrote the lawsuit in revenge for Gawker having outed him years earlier. Thiel admits in his interview that he financed other lawsuits against the media site to the total of USD 10 mn with the sole purpose of destroying Gawker. But Thiel doesn’t see it as revenge: he says it’s philanthropy.

… Felix Salmon points out that whatever one’s feeling about Gawker’s journalistic integrity, “Peter Thiel just gave other bn’aires a dangerous blueprint for perverting philanthropy: If Thiel’s strategy works against Gawker, it could be used by any bn’aire against any media organization. Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump, the list goes on and on. Up until now, they’ve mostly been content suing news organizations as plaintiffs, over stories which name them. But Thiel has shown them how to go thermonuclear: bankroll other lawsuits, as many as it takes, and bankrupt the news organization that way. Very few companies have the legal wherewithal to withstand such a barrage.” Does that warning seem hyperbolic? One should keep in mind that the NYT interview notes that Thiel is a pledged delegate for Trump in California. Without needing to finance other people’s lawsuits, Trump has already done much to bully and harass media figures, what’s to say he won’t also get into a little “philanthropy” himself?