There’s 10 years of backstory here.
This is Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who co-founded PayPal and was one of the earliest investors in Facebook.
Ben Margot / AP
Oh, he also founded three venture capital firms — Founders Fund, Mithril, and Valar — and the secretive data analysis startup Palantir.
In 2007, Valleywag, a former Gawker Media blog both revered and reviled for its reporting on Silicon Valley and its major players, published an article headlined “Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People.”
The blog post suggested that Thiel kept his sexuality a secret because the tech industry is run by straight, white men.
One of the first comments under the post was by Gawker founder Nick Denton, who questioned why Thiel would be so paranoid about revealing his sexuality.
"[Thiel] was so paranoid that, when I was looking into the story, a year ago, I got a series of messages relaying the destruction that would rain down on me, and various innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, if a story ever ran," Denton wrote.
According to a profile in The New Yorker, Thiel came out to his friends in 2003 and has been public about his sexual orientation since 2010.
Owen Thomas, the former editor of Valleywag, who authored the post on Thiel, insists he did not out the tech billionaire.
"I did discuss his sexuality, but it was known to a wide circle who felt that it was not fit for discussion beyond that circle," Thomas recently told the New York Times. "I thought that attitude was retrograde and homophobic, and that informed my reporting. I believe that he was out and not in the closet."
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/1Wnk1jd
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