Gawker Media has reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with Hulk Hogan , according to multiple reports, ending a years-long legal battle waged against it with the partial support of tech billionaire Peter Thiel. As Gawker founder Nick Denton wrote in a blog post this week announcing the settlement: “The saga is over.” The deal requires Gawker to pay Hogan (né Terry Bollea) $31 million, …
Twice a year, Y Combinator, a startup accelerator based in Mountain View, California, holds what it calls a Demo Day, which is a showcase of the latest batch of new companies it has nurtured. In the past, those have included Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit (as well as a number of companies no one remembers). Last week, at the most recent Demo Day, Eva Shang took to the stage to talk about her …
Legalist is a startup founded by Thiel Fellow Eva Shang and Christian Haigh, backed by Y Combinator: it will use data-mining to identify people who have been legally wronged by deep-pocketed aggressors and offer to finance their litigation in return for a share of the winnings. report this ad This tactic, called “champerty,” used to be illegal, but as it has morphed into the more thrusting, …
In the wake of a devastating lawsuit and a proposed selloff of its holding company to Univision, Gawker.com will shut down next week, ending almost 14 years of independent — and at times inflammatory — publishing. Gawker filed for bankruptcy protection in June, after a jury ordered it to pay celebrity wrestler Hulk Hogan $140 million in damages for the publication of a sex tape in which he is …
Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is defending his financial support for litigation targeting Gawker Media for its reporting on celebrities by likening it to efforts to crack down on privacy violations like “revenge porn.” In a New York Times op-ed on Monday defending his decision to fund a case that ultimately forced the media company to put itself up for sale, Thiel cited the Intimate Privacy …
Last night, Forbes reported out a rumor that has been circulating among media reporters for the last several months: Hulk Hogan’s $140 million lawsuit against Gawker Media was bankrolled by a wealthy benefactor, namely Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. The story, attributed to multiple anonymous sources, broke just hours before Gawker Media was scheduled to appear in a St. Petersburg, …
A day after Gawker founder Nick Denton told the New York Times he had a “personal hunch” that someone linked to Silicon Valley was funding the onslaught of lawsuits against Gawker Media—which resulted in a potentially …