Peter Thiel is demanding that he be given the chance to bid on Gawker.com, the gossip and news website he helped drive out of business and which is now being shopped in bankruptcy, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Lawyers representing Thiel said in papers filed on Wednesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York that the billionaire venture capitalist is “the most able and logical purchaser” of Gawker.com but that, so far, his overtures have been rebuffed by the administrator overseeing the sale process. Thiel’s interest in the website, which has been dormant since August 2016, adds a new twist to the continuing legal wrangling between him and publisher of the blog, Gawker Media LLC. Thiel secretly financed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the publisher, the ruling on which by a jury forced the Gawker Media and its founder Nick Denton into chapter 11 last year and, ultimately, out of business. The filing also raises a new question about the ultimate fate of Gawker.com and its archive. The Wall Street Journal reported in October that the sale process had put Gawker’s articles at risk of being deleted. A new owner of Gawker.com would be free to remove old articles from the website. Assets for sale include the Gawker domain, social media accounts and nearly 200,000 published articles.
