What happens when billionaires battle gossipmongers? Prepare for explosions.
Both men have gobs of money.
They didn’t make it the old-fashioned way, with steel and brick, but instead with big, disruptive, life-changing ideas.
After they got rich, after they’d achieved a titan status imaginable only in the digital age, that’s when the tabloids came for them.
And that’s when they went to war.
Theirs is a tale of two billionaires — Jeffrey P. Bezos of Amazon.com fame and Peter Thiel, who birthed PayPal. So different in style and temperament, the two men have each found their sex lives splashed in public against their wills in separate tabloid “gotchas.” But they have tangled with the merchants of salacity in completely opposite ways.
Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, blasted his disdain into the maw of the Internet, essentially delivering the equivalent of a lawyer’s opening statement with the entire planet sitting in the jury box. Thiel operated in sotto voce fashion, secretly maneuvering to exact revenge and not surfacing until he had triumphed.
Bezos is locked in a conflict with the National Enquirer, which last month published intimate text messages he’d sent to Lauren Sanchez, with whom he was having an extramarital affair, and photos of them together. In a Medium post Thursday, Bezos accused the supermarket tabloid, which is owned by American Media Inc., of blackmail and extortion for threatening to publish additional intimate photographs if he and his representatives did not agree to stop their investigation of the how the material was obtained. Bezos suggested that the tabloid, whose parent company is run by a friend of President Trump, had political motives to run stories about his affair. Trump has frequently attacked Bezos over his ownership of The Post.
Thiel’s battle took place against Gawker, the sassy and sometimes raunchy website that earned his eternal enmity by outing him as gay in 2007. He got back at the site in 2016 when he surreptitiously funded a successful lawsuit by Terry Bollea, better known as the wrestler Hulk Hogan, over the site’s 2012 publication of a tape depicting Bollea having sex. Gawker went out of business after a jury awarded $140 million in damages.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-happens-when-billionaires-battle-gossipmongers-prepare-for-explosions/2019/02/08/bb475576-2be8-11e9-b011-d8500644dc98_story.html?utm_term=.cebbb732c8aa&wpisrc=al_trending_now__alert-economy--alert-national&wpmk=1
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