"Having had no idea what made thiel hate gawker so much"

How about when they publicly outed him as gay, when he wasn't out to most of the general public?

Source, but don't visit it, in case you give those parasites a couple of dimes in the process: http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people

The wonders of adblock, wasting bandwidth and power while contributing a total of absolutely nothing to the companies in which you despise.