Even if Thiel were just an ordinary investor, dinner with him would make anyone nervous. He’s sitting down for a one-on-one evening with a man worth, by 2011, some $1.5 billion and who owns a significant chunk of the biggest social network in the world, on whose board of directors he also sits. Even so, the prospect of meeting with Thiel is intimidating: his stomach churning, every nerve and synapse alive and howling. A is ambitious, but it’s paired with self-confidence, social adeptness, and a clear sense of what Thiel wanted. It just happens that Frank James would size the young man up in the woods outside Blue Cut, Missouri: “You don’t have the ingredients, son.” He wants someone to give him an opportunity-a project through which he can prove his worth. He wants someone to recognize that in him. He thinks that he, himself, is a great man, too. He thinks the outlaw Jesse James is a great man. At the beginning, in the woods, Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck, illustrates this phenomenon. There is a scene in the movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. He’s fascinated by power and knows that Peter is a means by which he can wield it. It’s not fame he wants, or money either, or even to create the next big tech company. A is not just young but also ambitious, ambitious in a way that makes observers slightly uncomfortable, that makes him stand out even amongst the cadre of upstarts in Peter’s orbit. A, the pseudonym that almost everyone involved in the conspiracy refers to him by. This specific young man in Berlin, we shall refer to as Mr. But Peter attracts these types - mostly men early in their potentially ascendant careers - and puts them to good use: investing in them, giving them advice, placing them in start-ups, assigning them important roles in his operations. Aside from his Ivy League education, the young man has at this point achieved next to nothing. From the hotel emerges a short, fit young man of indiscernible origin. Peter arrives, driven in a black S-class Mercedes, the same model he has idling outside with a driver, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, wherever he is in the world. It began unremarkably, when Thiel traveled to Germany to speak at a conference and had dinner with a student he’d met on a tour of a university a few years before. Peter Thiel’s vague idea to do something about Gawker, the site that had outed him as gay in 2007, was concretized into conspiracy on April 6, 2011. This is an excerpt from Ryan Holiday’s new book Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, available now.

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