What happens when billionaires battle gossipmongers? Prepare for explosions.
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Both men have gobs of money.
They didn’t make it the old-fashioned way, with steel and brick, but instead with big, disruptive, life-changing ideas.
After they got rich, after they’d achieved a titan status imaginable only in the digital age, that’s when the tabloids came for them.
And that’s when they went to war.
Theirs is a tale of two billionaires — Jeffrey P. Bezos of Amazon fame and Peter Thiel, who birthed PayPal. So different in style and temperament, the two men have each found their sex lives splashed in public against their wills in separate tabloid “gotchas.” But they have tangled with the merchants of salacity in completely opposite ways.
Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, blasted his disdain into the maw of the Internet, essentially delivering the equivalent of a lawyer’s opening statement with the entire planet sitting in the jury box. Thiel operated in sotto voce fashion, secretly maneuvering to exact revenge and not surfacing until he had triumphed.
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