Conspiracy theories are legion. Conspiracies are rare. And of the few that do exist, fewer are ever discovered, let alone explained. This story is the exception.

In 2007, a short blog post on Valleywag, the Silicon Valley vertical of Gawker Media, outed the enigmatic Facebook and PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel as gay. In 2016, Gawker was forced to declare bankruptcy after a $140 million dollar judgment in a Florida court over an illegally recorded sex tape of Hulk Hogan with his best friend’s wife. These two seemingly unrelated events were in fact the bookends of a nearly decade-long plot masterminded by Thiel, for both obvious and non-obvious reasons. It had been one of the most covered and surreal legal cases in history and no one had suspected a thing.

With his unique perspective and exclusive access to all the key players, Ryan Holiday transforms these events into both a dissection of that controversial word and methodology - conspiracy - and an eye-opening cautionary tale on the use, abuse and consequences of power and secrecy in the modern age.