Gawker Media always found itself in trouble. Whether it was the company’s namesake site or one of their other properties, they were constantly upsetting the status quo and pissing off the establishment. The company went bankrupt after gay billionaire Peter Thiel bankrolled a lawsuit by former pro-wrestler Hulk Hogan for invasion of privacy after Gawker posted part of a leaked sex tape of the star with someone else’s wife.
Gawker outed both Thiel and the now-CEO of Apple, Tim Cook. Thiel got his revenge and now Cook is apparently getting his.
Related: Apple CEO Tim Cook quietly added his pronouns to his Twitter profile
Apple TV+ had planned on creating a series about the media company called Scrapers. Pitched by former staff, the project had hired other former Gawker editors as writers and had completed several episodes.
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But after Cook got wind of the project, he quickly registered his displeasure and Apple TV+ executives scrapped the series. It is now available for another service to pick up. The executive who gave the series the green light has now left the company.
One of the company’s other sites, Gizmodo, leaked images of the iPhone 4 in 2010 after a prototype of the phone was left in a bar. Gawker outed Cook in 2008, six years before he came out in an essay published in Bloomberg essay.
Cook was the first out CEO of a Fortune 500 company after coming out in a Bloomberg essay.
Cook reflected last year on his decision to publicly announce his orientation, saying, “I was getting notes from kids who were struggling with their sexual orientation. They were depressed. Some said [they] had suicidal thoughts. Some had been banished by their own parents and family. It weighed on me in terms of what I could do.”
