What Gawker did was disgusting, but what irks me about Thiel's actions is the fact that most of his wealth was created by investing in businesses that have sign

What Gawker did was disgusting, but what irks me about Thiel's actions is the fact that most of his wealth was created by investing in businesses that have significantly reduced consumer privacy (i.e. Facebook, Palantir, etc..). How many people have been accidentally outed due to Facebook's poor privacy practices? Gawker is a by-product of the current ecosystem that Silicon Valley has created. The rise of click bait journalism was a by product of incentives created by social media companies like Facebook. And Thiel sits in the center of this universe. If he really wants to be 'philanthropic' he should focus his efforts at the root causes of these issues. But he won't, because that is where his net worth comes from.