Three months before Gawker closed its doors for good, Forbes published an investigation revealing that Hulk Hogan’s ruinous lawsuit had been bankrolled by Peter Thiel. At the time, the billionaire Silicon Valley investor claimed that the suit was “less about revenge and more about specific deterrence” (in 2007, Gawker’s tech site, Valleywag, had published a report noting that Thiel was gay). According to a forthcoming book by tech columnist Ryan Holiday, however, retribution was clearly on Thiel’s mind as he discussed the possibility of “bribery, theft, bugging, and e-mail hacking, among other potential crimes,” in order to exact his revenge.

The Daily Beast, which has an excerpt from the book, describes how Thiel schemed with a man Holiday calls “Mr. A” to take down Gawker:

“‘It’s almost limitless what one could do,’ Mr. A says, musing on all the theoretical angles of attack they brainstormed in meetings at Thiel’s house and in late-night phone calls. Given the resources he had to draw on, the limitlessness of the options is nearly true: they could have bribed employees at Gawker to leak information, or hired operatives to ruin the company from the inside. They could have directed hackers to break into Gawker’s e-mail servers. Someone could have followed [Gawker founder] Nick Denton and, while he dined at Balthazar one morning, stolen his cell phone. A team could have attempted to bug the Gawker offices.”

“There are things that were very tempting, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Retributive justice,” Thiel tells Holiday in Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, for which he reportedly gave multiple on-the-record interviews. But Thiel and Mr. A eventually ruled out illegal means of retribution: “We decided very early on we would only do things that are totally legal, which is a big limitation.” Instead, they discussed how they could “create a shell company to hire former investigative reporters and lawyers to find causes of action against Gawker.” Mr. A proposed a timeline and a budget of “three to five years and $10 million.”

The latest revelation in the Thiel-Gawker affair is remarkable given Thiel’s position at Facebook, where he sits on the board of directors. “Any other year the news that a Facebook board member reportedly considered hacking the servers of a website that was mean to him and stealing its founder’s cellphone would be a big deal but I guess they have their hands full,” former Gawker editor Sam Biddle tweeted Monday. A spokesperson for Facebook declined a request for comment about Thiel’s seek-and-destroy mission.