I think that's taking the teeth out of it a little bit. I believe that he began working for Hogan in secret seeking revenge for being outed.
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).
Not because of the quality/moral fiber (or lack thereof) of their business model.
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.