http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley

Sometimes, transposing a real event into fiction is all that’s necessary to convert a news headline to an effective joke. It can also happen the other way around: the writers of “Silicon Valley,” like all the best satirists, occasionally try to stretch the truth and end up anticipating it instead. In the pilot, a sexist programmer invents an app called NipAlert, directing users to the nearest “woman with erect nipples.” “When I read that, I thought, Does that seem real or is it just a silly joke?” Berg said. Between when the pilot was filmed and when it aired, two actual entrepreneurs released Titstare, “an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits.” In a recent episode, Gavin Belson asks his lawyers to invent novel legal strategies that can silence a blogger who has treated him roughly. Again, given the timing, this couldn’t have been a response to the legal actions that the provocative venture capitalist Peter Thiel has taken against Gawker, but it certainly felt like one. In the first season, in the show’s most direct portrayal of a real person, Thiel was lightly fictionalized as Peter Gregory, a smart but socially graceless V.C. “I’m sure he was offended by it, because he’s offended by everything,” Swisher told me. “It’s amazing how thin-skinned some of these people are.” However, Thiel later invited some of the show’s creators to a party he was hosting in L.A., and he treated them politely. “He said he liked the show, which we were surprised to hear,” one of the producers told me. “He was not nearly as awkward in person as we’d been led to believe.” Maybe Thiel actually likes the show. Maybe he wants to prove that he can take a joke, even if he can’t. Maybe, calculating that it would be difficult to sue HBO out of existence, he prefers to hold his enemy close. Or maybe it’s like any other relationship in Silicon Valley: part personal, part business; part genuine, part transactional; part carrot, part stick.