The swift executive rotation was a deliberate strategy of former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, a management consultant by training. She called it "repotting" — moving executives around through different parts of the business. While it may have helped her charges' careers, it did nothing for PayPal. The latest potted plant to occupy PayPal's C-suite, Scott Thompson, is bragging to investors that PayPal will soon derive more than half its revenues from websites other than eBay. A good thing, considering how growth in eBay's core auction business is grinding to a halt.

Thiel saw this as a problem back in 2002. eBay was growing fast at the time, but PayPal's investors — the company was briefly publicly traded before eBay bought it — were worried about its dependence on another company. After eBay bought PayPal, executives spent years grinding away at "integration" — even though PayPal, as an independent concern, had managed to neatly fit its payment service with eBay's auctions, without much help from eBay — in fact, with eBay actively trying to replace it with its own BillPoint payment service.

In the years since, what has eBay done with PayPal? It's recycled ideas from the Thiel era, and tried to tout them as "innovatons." It has swollen the size of the PayPal unit to some 7,000 employees. ("What do they do?" a former PayPal executive asked me.) And it has leaned on PayPal to mask slow growth in its core business.

How much would PayPal be worth now on its own, without eBay's bloated management? Would Amazon.com and Google even be trying to challenge it in the payments business? Perhaps it's a question that shouldn't remain abstract.

eBay tried to buy PayPal several times; every time eBay returned to the bargaining table, PayPal's price went up. It finally took the workings of a liquid market to determine PayPal's worth; after PayPal's IPO, eBay had to pay a fair price for the payments company.

Yes, it's time for another PayPal IPO. Too bad Peter Thiel isn't available to run the company — he's making far more money on his hedge fund than he ever did from PayPal.

(Photo by David Orban)

In a word, yes. I instant-messaged Denton — that's the only way he communicates, really — asking him to elaborate, and he replied: "Oh, just because he's got such a nauseatingly successful track record."

A British-born Financial Times beat reporter sent to cover Silicon Valley during the dotcom boom, Denton reinvented himself as a technology entrepreneur. He sold a dotcom events business, First Tuesday, in a luckily timed deal as the bubble was bursting. He briefly entangled himself in an online newsfeeds venture called iSyndicate before starting a direct competitor, Moreover (that's "more OH ver," you Yanks.) But he quit as CEO years before VeriSign bought the company. He's the first to admit that his success is more from good timing than hard work.

Denton's clearly wealthy. He owns a fancy loft in New York's SoHo neighborhood. He funded Gawker Media, as best I can tell, out of his own pocket. At the same time, he invested in other blog ventures like Treehugger and Curbed. But he's far, far short of Thiel's $500 million a year. In 2004, when he first courted me as a blogger, I asked him where he made his fortune. He gave me a vague answer about currency trading and investing in London real estate. Denton is familiar with the business of manipulating markets. He cowrote All That Glitters, a book on on the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank caused by one young trader.

Having observed Denton for years, I have to say this: He's never seemed happer than when working as an editor. I was almost sorry to replace him as Valleywag's editor a year ago, because he so clearly enjoyed the role. When he appointed himself editor of Gawker in January, it seemed more a homecoming than a temp gig.

That's why I found Denton's note so mysterious. Could he be unhappy as the blogosphere's success story? Does he wish he'd instead joined the lucrative hedge-fund world?

I'll admit I barely know the man. In an age of oversharing, Denton makes an art of revealing no personal details. That's what makes those four words stand out: "Thiel makes me sick!" I almost wish I hadn't asked him to explain himself.

(Photo of Thiel by David Orban; Denton by Matt Haughey)

Francisco worked for as a reporter for MarketWatch when it was part-owned by CBS, and also worked as a business anchor for San Francisco's KPIX, which is wholly owned by parent network CBS. But that was before an article by CNET News.com reporter Greg Sandoval exposed her ownership stake in the online video startup focused on "innovators" and her financial relationship with Clarium Capital's Peter Thiel, a Vator.tv investor. Sandoval called into question her journalistic independence. Francisco resigned from MarketWatch, now owned by Dow Jones.

In the video clip, Francisco seems to ask a tough question about whether the $5 million acquisition of Wallstrip was "worth it." But when Marquez exclaims that MobLogic.tv — the project from the Wallstrip producers featuring former Wallstrip host Lindsay Campbell — is "doing extremely well," Francisco doesn't challenge it. While we've enjoyed Campbell's hardboiled reporting, we hear the show is struggling to attract viewers. And the show's YouTube channel hasn't cracked five figures in views.

But the most entertaining consequence if CBS were to buy Vator.tv would be the prospect of Francisco and Sandoval meeting at a company picnic. Awkward!

We hear Clarium's holdings are up 30 percent in a year, from $3 billion to $5 billion. For hedge funds, the standard deal is that the managers keep 20 percent of profits, which means Thiel's take would come to $400 million. Has anyone on Wall Street been posting those kinds of numbers lately?

1) conservative political education and activism, 2) life extension research, 3) a specific strain of Christian philosophy, and 4) university life.

Clarium already has an office in New York, and Thiel an apartment there. So the move would have more of an effect on his employees than on Thiel. As brainy as the Valley is, financial expertise is still centered in New York, as are the deep pools of capital Thiel would tap. For Clarium's existing workers who might be asked to move, the prospect is unsettling.

There is one other aspect to Thiel's move that fascinates. I've been told Thiel has been dating Matt Danzeisen, a vice president at BlackRock, for some time and the handsome fellow pictured above to the right of Thiel. (No one has yet confirmed for me if they're still going steady.)

An acquaintance of Thiel scoffs at the idea that Thiel would do anything for romantic reasons. Thiel, he says, is an utterly rational thinker. But the heart is capable of its own rationalizations. The mere possibilty that Thiel might maximize happiness, rather than profit, is a comforting thought.