It’s a matchup that would impress Vince McMahon. We’ve now learned — courtesy of an interview he did with the NYT’s Andrew Ross Sorkin — that Peter Thiel has indeed been financing Hulk Hogan’s legal battle against Gawker as part of a decade-long quest for revenge against the publisher that publicly outed him; and that he’d just as soon see destroyed. Thiel (founder of PayPal, investor in Facebook, etc) acknowledged that he has funded similar efforts and explained that his effort to delete Gawker is “one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done.” (Let’s hope he never finds a hitman who has 501c3 status.)

+ “We should not be surprised that they act like entitled industrialists out here, because they are.” Also, from the NYT: In Silicon Valley, Gossip, Anger and Revenge. (Again, we’re talking about Silicon Valley, the place, not the show.)

+ Felix Salmon: “The Facebook board member and Silicon Valley demigod just gave the world a master class in how a billionaire can achieve enormous ends with a relatively modest investment …Thiel’s tactics in going after Gawker are very, very frightening for anybody who believes in freedom of speech; they’re also extremely effective, in an evil-genius kind of way.” (I still remember when tech billionaires tried to save publishers.)

+ I’ve got a thing or two to say to Peter Thiel, but first I need to put masking tape over my laptop camera and delete the folder on my hard drive that I labeled, Other Files. This was probably a mistake, but here’s my open letter to Peter Thiel, Gawker, and Hulk Hogan.