Yeah, there was a lot more to it than that.

And while I personally found Gawker trashy and not worth a lot of respect, Thiel had profile pictures on open social media accounts of him shirtless on gay cruises. Short of a formal press release saying "I am gay", this wasn't any particular revelation.

(As to the "well, it's still noone's business" - while I agree, the courts have repeatedly held that billionaires are considered "public figures" "by virtue of the undue or oversized influence they wield or are capable of wielding" - so Thiel had little legal claim to his own situation, so used someone else as a proxy for his own grievances).

The courts have also held that gawker should not exist anymore

That's... obtuse. They held that Gawker should not exist anymore because they became insolvent/ bankrupt due to this.

Not because of the quality/moral fiber (or lack thereof) of their business model.

Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that Hogan's case was a legitimate one, he just lacked the funding to see it through. AND you're forgetting that Gawker could've avoided the whole thing if they had obeyed the earlier court order to take the video down.

Hogan had agreed with Gawker to take part ownership of Gawker including revenues, and then that was reneged upon after meeting with Thiel's (his) lawyers again, and similar after multiple points of near settlement.

The damages were then upped to ridiculous amounts. Financial / economic (not emotional) damages were listed at $50M.

Bollea's net worth, at it's peak, was $30-40M (edit: from $25M), and is now estimated at $8M - though most of that has been stripped by divorce, before any of this happened.

I am not sure how someone whose likely career income didn't reach $50M can now, in retirement, state that he suffered $50M in purely economic damages from this (remember, the emotional damage is separate, as is the punitive) - from what? Not from residuals on old WWF repeats - he would still be entitled to these. The occasional celebrity endorsement?

I can't see any realistic justification that his earning power for the rest of his life would total $50M, let alone that $50M only covers the fraction of his income that he _lost_ because of this.

Maybe a message needed to be sent that journalists aren't above disobeying court orders. Perhaps they should've done the right thing when they still had the chance. Everything else is just whining about how something that could happen (a judgement against them), did.

That's a matter for the court to decide, then. Not for a plaintiff to claim non-existent or dubious factual claims as to lost income.

It sounds like the court did think his claim was accurate, I'm pretty sure the judge has the ability to make decisions on what damages should be.

Well, not for nothing, the initial award was $140M. That has been reduced by over $100M to $31M...