Peter Thiel won’t be buying Gawker after all.
The billionaire investor who helped bankrupt the once-mighty gossip empire reached an agreement Wednesday with an administrator for the company’s remaining assets to withdraw his bid to purchase the website — and its story archive, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Thiel’s public musings about buying the property he helped destroy had been fiercely opposed by team Gawker and many media critics who feared he would delete the website’s archives if he gained control of them.
Thiel did not immediately respond to request for comment from TheWrap.
The conservative Silicon Valley titan famously bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s invasion of privacy lawsuit against Gawker after the website published a sex tape between Hogan and the wife of his then-best friend Bubba the Love Sponge.