Peter Thiel May Be Looking To Buy Gawker.com

In a federal bankruptcy court filing on Wednesday, lawyers for venture capitalist Peter Thiel objected to the ongoing sale process of Gawker.com, arguing that the billionaire has been unfairly excluded from bidding for the assets of the defunct news website.

The filing, which comes more than a year after the revelation that Thiel helped finance a clandestine legal war to destroy Gawker.com’s parent company, Gawker Media, lays the groundwork for the Facebook board member’s possible bid for the dormant website. While its sister sites were sold to Univision in August 2016 for $135 million following Gawker Media’s bankruptcy, a bankruptcy plan administrator has not been able to find a buyer for Gawker.com. Whoever ends up buying the site will also buy its archives, which are still up, and will have the right to do with them what they want, including delete them.

While rumors had been floating in media circles that Thiel could hypothetically buy Gawker.com and remove its contents from the web, the billionaire has never publicly addressed whether he was interested in the site’s assets. Prior to Gawker Media’s bankruptcy and its loss in the Hogan trial, a banker, who claimed to have the back of at least one Silicon Valley power player, had called former Gawker Media employees around January 2016 to discuss the possible buyout of the company, according to Forbes.

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton asked the question in an open letter to Thiel in May 2016. “Is your goal to bankrupt, buy, or wound Gawker Media?” he wrote. “If you were to own the company after a final judgment in the Hogan case, what would your editorial strategy be?”


https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/peter-thiel-may-want-to-buy-gawker-dot-com?utm_term=.luMlokqnGD#.hkG7NV21Em