Conspiracy, page 6
They are seated to dinner at Restaurant Tim Raue promptly at 8:00 p.m. A reservation has been called ahead, a good table secured, in a restaurant that has hosted Obama, Merkel, and other world leaders. This was Berlin, not far from Checkpoint Charlie, but it could have been New York, Los Angeles, London, Brussels, Tokyo. It’s quiet, filled with the kind of global elites who need to know that wherever you are in the world you get your two-Michelin-star-quality sautéed brussels sprouts and pork belly. Feigning confidence, Mr. A glances at the menu and orders the eight-course tasting menu. Peter beckons the sommelier over to order wine. He asks what kind of wine Mr. A likes. Hearing Riesling, he makes his request: “We’ll have a bottle of this one.” It’s the second most expensive Riesling on the menu.
The butterflies settle. The conversation has wound itself down naturally and now there is nothing left but for Mr. A to seize the moment. This moment that few get. The chance for a pitch that can change your life. There is something popular with ambitious people called the “briefcase technique.” You don’t show up to a meeting with a few vague ideas, you have a full-fledged plan that you take out of your briefcase and hand to the person you are pitching. Even if nothing comes of this plan, the person on the other side is knocked over by your effort, so impressed by the unexpected certainty that they cannot help but see your usefulness to them. Mr. A unlocks that figurative briefcase on the table: “Okay, I know what you think about Gawker, here’s what I am proposing. . . .”
Thiel had spoken about Gawker many times. He had spoken about it in interviews, he had complained about it to friends. It had come up in passing in conversation when Mr. A and Thiel had first met a few years before. Now sitting at this table in the city that birthed a thousand Cold War plots and counterplots, Thiel finds that first successful return of those many trial balloons. Ambition and opportunity have collided and the kid in front of him is proposing a solution to that problem that Thiel has set upon trying to solve: Peter should create a shell company to hire former investigative reporters and lawyers to find causes of action against Gawker. Gawker has written thousands of articles about thousands of people; it must have made a mistake somewhere. Mr. A’s proposal is more than just an idea, it’s a comprehensive, structured plan: he has researched some names, he has a timeline and a budget.
Three to five years and $10 million.
Peter replies with one of his customary pauses. The silence hangs there, one second, two seconds, ten seconds, and like so many others before, Mr. A wonders if this suggestion is crazy, if he has blown his chance. And then Peter begins to talk, interrupts himself as he does, as if he still needs time to decide his own thoughts, and then repeats the words he has been told by so many others, so many times—that there was nothing that could be done. Has Peter come to believe this? Is he testing the young man before him?
Here is where the ambition and naïveté of youth are so powerful. Mr. A responded with words that were absurd for someone of his age, someone who in fact knew little about the world except from what he had read and learned in school. Except he was right and the words he spoke were the type a man like Thiel could not resist. “Peter, if everyone thought that way, what would the world look like?”
“Just hearing that was so refreshing,” Peter would say later, “because of course what you always heard were these incremental things that wouldn’t quite do it.” Yet Gawker is hardly a pressing issue in 2011. Valleywag, the site that had written about Peter, has been temporarily shuttered. Mr. A is then in the position of convincing the healthy man how bad it is to be sick. He picks a seductive angle for Thiel then. He isn’t talking about defense—not simply righting a wrong that had been done to him, or insulating his own business against someone with a grudge—but something that feels more noble and inspiring than that. It is more than the servant whispering to Darius, “Master, remember the Athenians.” It is Peter, think about all the people they’ve hurt. It’s going to keep happening. It’s only going to get worse. If you—the billionaire—can’t do anything about it, who can?
Peter had seen many ambitious upstarts out of what Alexandra Wolfe called the “eternal freshman herds” of Silicon Valley. But Mr. A is different. Multiple people, describing him to me, borrowed Robert Caro’s description of LBJ as a young man: a professional son. Lyndon Johnson knew how to identify a susceptibility for protégés in older successful people and then make himself into theirs. Mr. A had that. In fact, he would self-identify with the label of professional son, too.
The professional son understands what every father wants—a progeny worth his time, someone to invest in, someone who can further his legacy. The professional father wants to see his greatness given a second body—a younger one, with more energy, with the benefit of his hard-won experiences. Peter was then not married, and he has no children. There is a loneliness there.
Rooted in every conspiracy is often shared loneliness, a smoldering frustration or bitterness. Of not being listened to. Of the world not understanding. Two people come together and this smoldering becomes the small flicker of a flame for the first time. Someone shares this with me. I am not alone. Two is more than one and can become three, four, five quickly. And so across the table at that restaurant in Berlin, the conspiracy begins.
It would be a mistake to confuse Peter’s pondering Socratic-ness for uncertainty. His mind, for all its detours and considerations, ultimately meanders toward precision, the kind that calculates down to the ten-thousandth decimal point in ordinary conversation. He is the kind of man who might make a multimillion bet without hesitation. It’s only if you ask him a question about an arcane point in Russian literature that you get the long pause of consideration. He wouldn’t want to just spout off. But if he thinks he has some deep idea about human nature, about the market, he’ll go all in.
In this case, after a few hours with a person he knew only socially, at a meeting that ended in a hotel bar at 3:00 a.m., Thiel committed up to $10 million on an uncertain venture. There is much brainstorming left to do but he has given the green light. Thiel has committed to pursuing a conspiracy through the most untraditional of means—not with the help of some PR specialist; not with some grizzled political operative who knows how to grease palms or lobby the right lawmakers; but by investing entirely in a person who had literally not accomplished a thing in his life. When the CIA plots the overthrow of some foreign government, they don’t turn to the most junior agent and say, “We’ll follow your lead.”
As with many alliances, the two have differing motives. Thiel seems to be alternately compelled by a sense of justice and an interest in doing the impossible. To him, Gawker is a vicious thing, a cultural problem that he can solve. To Mr. A, it is, at least at first, simply an opportunity. Rich Cohen once wrote that “one definition of evil is to fail to recognize the humanity in the other: to see a person as an object or tool, something to be put to use.” Gawker’s writers were certainly guilty of that sin, but getting into that black car with Peter, Mr. A had a similar evil in his heart. Destroying Gawker was just a way for him to make his mark. To be the professional son. To show a big and important person that he had the ingredients to do something equally big and important.
It was paramount to Peter that he not be associated with the plot in any way. Some would later argue that this is inherently deceitful, but I’m not sure why that would be so. The hiring of the anonymous cutout is not just practical—a young kid will attract less attention, he is the messenger who can travel here and there without notice, and is a billionaire really supposed to do all the work himself?—it is more a matter of strategy. If Thiel wishes to set a precedent with the Gawkers of the world, it is better that it appears the world is sending that message and not someone with a personal score to settle. It would be better were it to appear that whatever fate befell Gawker happened not because some rich person had brought it about, but because it was a matter of justice and fairness and karma. This would mean that Thiel would never be associated with the events he is about to put in motion, that the public will have no idea who was ultimately responsible. Strategically, practically, Mr. A represents those things. He is also, more simply, there to take the fall if something goes wrong.
With his first hire, Thiel’s conspiracy is stronger, by virtue of simply existing, yet it is also naturally weaker. This is the risk of combining with allies. The strategic benefit of adding a new coconspirator comes at the cost of substantially increasing the chance of getting caught. While you do want to find the right people . . . you typically want as few of them as possible.
A few weeks later, Mr. A finishes his exams, graduates, and flies home to see his parents on one of the last planes he will board with an economy ticket. He is excited, yet he cannot say a word about why—to them or anyone. Within a week, he is with Peter at his home in New Zealand. The planning begins. The whirlwind of travel will not stop until he is nearly thirty.
The image of Silicon Valley is that the start-up comes together quickly, from idea to minimum viable product to world-changing business in a montage of exciting steps. In truth, like conspiracies, it takes a little longer. The path can be meandering. PayPal’s anti-fraud insights took several years to become Palantir. Thiel had registered the name before he truly founded the company that looked for outside investment. Even Peter’s hedge fund had been something he’d started before PayPal and only came back to after PayPal. Thiel calls this the prehistory of a company, of a conspiracy.
The two conspirators meet again that summer at Peter’s home in San Francisco, beginning a routine that would become a compartmentalized piece of their lives for the next half decade: meetings at one of Peter’s homes to strategize. Regular phone calls to check in. Their discussions would confirm a theory that both Mr. A and Thiel had developed independently. “Gawker’s modus operandi was to have hurtful speech with no repercussions because they believed that the court system didn’t work, that the people had no access to it,” Peter said. Thiel and Mr. A are both law school graduates, but in their meetings they had concluded that any legal testing of this theory would require the addition of someone who had actually passed the bar, and then they would need to bring into the conspiracy the lawyer who would represent them in the cases they might bring. Because the United Kingdom has long been seen as more favorable to lawsuits against publishers, Mr. A begins to research the case law. Finding this angle promising, he goes to London to interview law firms and get legal advice—hoping to find a partner. At a set of swanky law offices near the Museum of London he is told that revenge cases were not their forte and that such a scheme was unlikely to succeed. The firm suggests some American firms that might have a taste for blood, including some based in Los Angeles. One stands out. Even the name is more fitting for what Thiel and Mr. A are trying to do: Wolf Rifkin.
Wolf Rifkin is a powerful law firm, but let’s just say it’s considerably less classy than the Brits who had made the referral. Its office is above the headquarters for Krav Maga Worldwide. The main tenant in its building in West Los Angeles is Wonderful Pistachios. Sandwiched between the headquarters for a self-defense system renowned for its brutal counterattacks and a massive distributor of nuts that are notoriously hard to crack was the perfect law firm for Peter Thiel.
Almost a year after his own meeting with Thiel, Mr. A meets with an attorney named Charles Harder to potentially recruit him into the conspiracy. Charles Harder is tall and thin with sandy blond hair then and now smeared with gray at the temples. He’s prone to the occasional Jackie Chiles–esque rhetorical flourish: “It’s repugnant, I think it’s unethical, I think it’s immoral, I think it’s disgusting and filthy.” He has the tan and the blue eyes that only Californians seem to have. He dresses in that Beverly Hills chic of jeans and a plaid button-up that still somehow costs hundreds of dollars, but there is no doughiness there, it’s the lean body of a former athlete. In many ways he is the opposite of Thiel—stylish, at ease, upbeat, and gregarious. Before this case, his name was unknown and unseen outside Hollywood Reporter articles about lawsuits that George Clooney filed against electronics companies for using his image without permission. As recently as 2009, Harder was fighting on behalf of celebrities to get their domain names back from squatters. His own website celebrated domain name wins that year for Kate Hudson and Sandra Bullock and Cameron Diaz and Sigourney Weaver, and not much else.
Mr. A finds himself confiding in this unlikely coconspirator, a lawyer whose name isn’t on the building, who had no outsized reputation, explaining, “I have been charged to take down a major media outlet by a group of wealthy individuals who will fund causes of action. Would you be interested?” The answer is yes, Harder is interested. Very interested.
Mr. A takes a certain pride in this little lie, the use of the word individuals instead of individual. Throughout the conspiracy, he would try to refer to Thiel as “my principals”—implying that there was some consortium of backers involved. Mr. A believed it was much less likely that Harder would demand to speak to them, to go over the head of this twenty-something, if it was much less clear whom he would be going to. And finally, the plurality of benefactors gave Mr. A a certain duplicative freedom. If money was slow, he could blame the delay on coordination problems. If he was unsure of something, he could buy time to deliberate. He could use the illusion of a group for pressure, as cover for different opinions, for expressing doubts, and for anything else he needed.
And what does Harder see in this twenty-something who has come into his office, who alternates between fantastical certainty and obsequious flattery? He sees the same thing that Peter Thiel sees in the professional son: an opportunity, energy, raw potential, and talent. Even if he is skeptical of the venture, Harder sees something less glamorous but much more real than conviction or righteous anger: billable hours. In the language of the legal profession: churn, baby, churn.
From here begins the dance of recruitment, the sussing out of intentions without revealing too many of your own. How much can Mr. A share without saying the name? Gawker. How enticing can he be about his financial position without making himself seem like a deep-pocketed mark? He would have asked simple questions: What do you know about this company, Gawker Media? What do you think about them? How do you work? Harder would have asked some of his own: What does success look like for you? Why are you doing this?
Harder doesn’t ask directly, not then, not ever: Who is behind this? He seems entirely comfortable with being the hatchet man for an unknown entity with unknown motivations. He could have been working for a dictator or for Gawker’s competitor just trying to damage a rival. Mr. A would say that Harder’s strength was compartmentalization: he was content with his role on the team. He could manage the inherent difficulty of serving two masters, his clients and his client, without violating his obligations as a lawyer, and knew how to keep those obligations from ever conflicting with each other.
This compartmentalization is key to a conspiracy. Not everyone can be in charge. Mr. Harder works for the clients whose bills are paid by Mr. A, who works for Mr. Thiel (while Mr. Harder does not know who Mr. Thiel is). Not everyone can know every element, or give their opinion on all of it. Not every decision can be explained or needs to be. At some point, some people’s job is just to answer the phones, to press the buttons, to shred the documents, to argue in court, because that’s what they are paid to do. They are paid to do a job.
But that’s the nice thing about lawyers: as long as you’re paying them, they’re usually good with whatever terms go along with it. Compartmentalization is their job. It’s how they represent people who are guilty, how they file long motions they know are unlikely to be successful, how they can patiently keep secrets that they’d otherwise love to be able to share.
Harder was nearly twenty years into his legal career when he was first approached. Though he often worked on celebrity cases they tended to be for routine matters, not exciting criminal proceedings or blockbuster cases, and when you’re retained to enforce rights of privacy and publicity on behalf of your clients, it tends to follow that they don’t want you grandstanding in the media on their behalf, building a profile as you work for them. His last appearance in the New York Times had been in 2001, about a case for a client who had been let go from an ad firm almost immediately after she left her new job to join it. Harder won two months’ back pay. It’s not exactly the kind of victory that marked the career of lawyers like Marty Singer, whom Harder had once worked for, and whom the Times had called the “Guard Dog to the Stars.” A lawyer who had publicly fought cases over celebrity sex tapes, who tangled with Gawker once on behalf of Rebecca Gayheart and the actor Eric Dane when their tape had run on Gawker and managed to eke out a small settlement, without an admission of guilt. So why not hire Singer? Because Peter Thiel and Mr. A didn’t want someone who was content to settle, or another lawyer who knew the standard Hollywood saber-rattling routine. They wanted someone who would win. Now, in mid-2012, they appear to have that man.
In the search for collaborators, hunger is an essential qualification. While it’s dangerous to conspire with people who have a lot to lose, you can’t conspire without someone who is afraid to bet on themselves, who isn’t willing to take a big stake on something that very well could fail. Where these two traits overlap there is often a sweet spot: the man or woman who has something to prove and something to protect, the strong sense of self-belief coupled with that killer instinct.
