Matt Taibbi

Early life and education Matt Taibbi was born in 1970 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Taibbi's father, Mike Taibbi, is an NBC television reporter whose biological mother was of mixed Filipino and Native Hawaiian descent, while his father was likely an American serviceman. Mike Taibbi was adopted by an Italian-American couple in New York. According to Taibbi, his surname is a Sicilian name of Lebanese origin; however, he is of neither Sicilian nor Lebanese descent because his father was adopted. He is of Irish descent through his mother. He first attended New York University but was "unable to deal with being just one of thousands of faces in a city of millions" and transferred after his freshman year to Bard College, where he graduated in 1992. He later contracted pneumonia and, in early January 1997, returned to Boston for surgery to correct an empyema.

Taibbi wrote in English and Russian. He also contributed to Komsomolskaya Pravda, Trud, Stringer and Kommersant. A film based on the book was under development by producers Ted Hope and James Schamus of Good Machine but did not materialize. He later stated that he was addicted to heroin while he did this early writing. Taibbi later described the incident as "an aberration from how I've behaved in the last six or seven years". In a Facebook post responding to the controversy, Taibbi apologized for the "cruel and misogynistic language" used in the book, and said the work was conceived as a satire of the "reprehensible" behavior of American expatriates in Russia and that the description of events in the chapter was "fictional and not true". In 2017, the Washington Post published an article by journalist Kathy Lally about Taibbi and Ames' time at the eXile. Lally wrote that the "eXile's distinguishing feature, more than anything else, was its blinding sexism — which often targeted [her]" and that "so many of their sins were real". Although the book presents itself as a work of non-fiction, emails obtained by Paste in 2017 include a letter from the book's publisher stating that "This book combines exaggerated, invented satire and nonfiction reporting and was categorized as nonfiction because there is no category for a book that is both." Two women portrayed in the book told Paste magazine that none of the sexual harassment portrayed in the book "[ever] happened" and that it was a "ridiculous passage written by Mark". He left that publication a year later, published in the New York Press, was denounced by Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Matt Drudge, Abe Foxman and Anthony Weiner. He left the paper in August 2005, shortly after his editor Jeff Koyen was forced out over the article. Taibbi defended the piece as "off-the-cuff burlesque of truly tasteless jokes," written to give his readers a break from a long run of his "fulminating political essays". Taibbi also said he was surprised at the vehement reactions to what he wrote "in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze".

In February 2008, Taibbi contributed a three-minute segment to Real Time with Bill Maher in which he interviewed residents of Youngstown, Ohio before the Ohio primary. He was invited as a guest on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show and other MSNBC programs. He has also appeared on Democracy Now! and Chapo Trap House, and was a contributor on Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Taibbi has appeared on the Thom Hartmann radio and television shows and the Imus in the Morning Show on the Fox Business network.

Taibbi wrote a column, "The Sports Blotter", for the free weekly newspaper, The Boston Phoenix.

Rolling Stone In 2004, Taibbi began covering politics for Rolling Stone.

Taibbi covered the 2008 United States presidential election in Year of the Rat, a special Rolling Stone diary.

After conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart died in March 2012, Taibbi wrote an obituary in Rolling Stone, entitled "Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche". Taibbi also wrote: "Good! Fuck him. I couldn't be happier that he's dead." He wrote that the obituary was "at least half an homage", which gave respect to aspects of Breitbart's style and also alluded to Breitbart's own derisive obituary of Ted Kennedy. In a postscript, Taibbi wrote that some fans of Breitbart were angered by the obituary and responded with "threats and insults". In financial and political media the expression "Vampire Squids" has come to represent the perception of the financial and investment sector as entities that "sabotage production" and "sink the economy as they suck the life out of it in the form of rent." Tackling the assistance to banks given in foreclosure courts, Taibbi traveled to Jacksonville, Florida to observe the "rocket docket". He was brought in to observe a hearing with attorney April Charney. He concluded that it processed foreclosures without regard to the legality of the financial instruments being ruled upon, and sped up the process to enable quick resale of the properties, while obscuring the fraudulent and predatory nature of the loans.

In February 2014, Taibbi left Rolling Stone and joined First Look Media to head a financial and political corruption-focused publication, Racket. However, after management disputes with First Look's leadership delayed its launch and led to its cancellation, Taibbi returned to Rolling Stone the following October.

Useful Idiots In August 2019, Taibbi launched a political podcast, Useful Idiots, co-hosted with Katie Halper and released through Rolling Stone. The podcast has since featured interviews with various guests including Liz Franczak, Andre Damon, David Dayen, Cornel West, Glenn Greenwald, and Aaron Maté.

In March 2021, Taibbi announced that Useful Idiots would no longer be released by Rolling Stone and would be self-published. With a few changes in program support staff, it is published as both audio and video that features both a free subscription and a paid subscription.

In January 2022, he announced a sabbatical leave to write a book, and that in his absence, Maté would fill in for him.

Self-publishing In 2018, Taibbi began publishing a novel, The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing: Adventures of the Unidentified Black Male, as a serialized subscription via email and a website with an anonymous partner. The novel is fictional with true-crime elements. As he then published the book "Hate, Inc." in serial form on his Substack, that was used as the title. In 2019, when "Hate, Inc." completed, the Substack was still being published in addition to other assignments. It went through additional name changes as Taibbi published both one-off posts and started projects that sometimes remained unfinished, until becoming TK News. Taibbi branded his newsletter TK News, after a term used in manuscript preparation for publication and journalism, TK, that stands for "to come", indicating that more will follow. After a period of publication with free subscriptions only, Taibbi introduced an additional, paid subscription featuring content that will not be provided as part of the free subscriptions. As of October 2021, TK News had more than 30,000 paying subscribers.

Racket News Racket News is a newsletter, blog, podcast, and book collection made available largely for free and the rest by subscription at www.racket.news. Racket News is published online. It is among a growing number of worker-owned journalism outlets including, 404 Media, Defector Media, and Hell Gate NYC.

In addition to Taibbi, contributors include Jane Burn, Ford Fischer, Walter Kirn and Eric Salzman. Other contributors include Emily Bivens, Andrew Lowenthal, Jared Moore, cartoonist Daniel Medina and Matt Orfalea. A transcript of each episode is also published weekly and the podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, in addition to Racket News.

Taibbi is one of the most popular writers on Substack and earns much more from the platform than he did writing for Rolling Stone.

Twitter Files

On December 2, 2022, Taibbi began tweeting about and screenshotting emails that executives of Twitter sent each other concerning content moderation in 2020. The emails were provided to Taibbi by Twitter CEO Elon Musk and documented parts of the discussions among Twitter's communication team about how Twitter should handle a New York Post article about a laptop computer that had been owned by Hunter Biden. The documents, dubbed the "Twitter Files" and retweeted by Musk, were selected from "thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter".

Taibbi's presentation largely confirmed what was already known and did not contain any significant new revelations on the Hunter Biden laptop story. Jeffrey Blehar, writing for National Review, said that Taibbi's reporting "contained few, if any, explosive revelations for people who have been tuned in to the debacle surrounding Twitter's suppression of the New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop". Taibbi's thread included emails from Ro Khanna to former Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde, in which Khanna expressed concern about Twitter's decision to limit the circulation of the New York Post article about Hunter Biden. Khanna wrote that Twitter's actions violated "1st Amendment principles".

The third installment, released on December 9 by Taibbi, highlighted events within Twitter leading to Donald Trump's suspension from Twitter. The sixth installment, released on December 16 by Taibbi, described how the FBI contacted Twitter to suggest that action be taken against several accounts for allegedly spreading election disinformation. Taibbi's ninth installment, released on December 24, relates to the CIA and FBI's alleged involvement in Twitter content moderation. The fifteenth installment, released on January 27, 2023, by Taibbi, reports on the Hamilton 68 Dashboard maintained by the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The sixteenth installment, released on February 18 by Taibbi, reports on messages to Twitter by Maine senator Angus King and U.S. State Department security engineer Mark Lenzi expressing concern regarding Twitter accounts they deemed suspicious. The seventeenth installment, released on March 2, by Taibbi, reports on the Global Engagement Center, which was established by the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act. The nineteenth installment of the Twitter Files, "The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine, Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of "True Stories" raises questions about the government and social media censorship.

On March 9, Taibbi testified, with Michael Shellenberger, before the United States House Committee on the Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in a hearing on the Twitter Files. Several Democrats at the hearing criticized both Taibbi and Shellenberger, including Stacey Plaskett, who referred to both as "so-called journalists."

Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC interviewed Taibbi on April 6, presenting several errors in the Twitter Files reporting. Taibbi asserted that these errors were trivial. The next day, Taibbi announced he was leaving Twitter within days in response to Twitter banning links to Substack after it announced its new feature Notes, which has been characterized as a competitor to Twitter. Musk unfollowed Taibbi later that day.

Taibbi received a visit from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents the day he testified to Congress about the Twitter Files. Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has demanded that IRS turn over copies of documents related to its search.

In February 2024, Taibbi revealed that he and Musk had a falling out which culminated in Musk messaging him, "You are dead to me. Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack". Taibbi later said Musk had been "very disappointing" on the issue of free speech.

Congressional testimony Taibbi has testified before congress on multiple occasions on the topic of censorship. +TopicDateCommitteeSubcommittee"Hearing on The Weaponization of The Federal Government" November 30, 2023 February 12, 2025 April 1, 2025 House Foreign Affairs CommitteeFull Committee

Political views Since the mid-2010s, Taibbi's reporting has increasingly focused on culture war topics and cancel culture. He has also criticized mainstream media and their coverage of Donald Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. His writing has since polarized readers and fellow journalists. Reviewing the book for Paste, Jason Rhode called it a "brilliant indictment of American media", praising the majority of the book but criticized Taibbi for "[spending] a section of his book both-sidesing both MSNBC and FOX".

During the Munk Debates on November 22, 2022, Taibbi and conservative Douglas Murray successfully argued in favor of the motion "Be it resolved, don't trust Mainstream Media".

In a June 2023 interview with The Hub, Taibbi said that "I want the mainstream media to succeed. I think it needs to. The countries are not healthy if they don't have a functioning mass media and nobody believes them. And I think increasingly that's kind of the problem, is there's this lingering worsening trust issue that can only be addressed by dealing with some of the factual issues."

Donald Trump and Russian election interference Using the term "Russiagate", Taibbi covered the story around Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and criticized the mainstream media coverage of the Special Counsel investigation. Taibbi's book Hate Inc. includes a chapter, "Why Russiagate Is This Generation's WMD", in which he compares "Russiagate" to 2002–2003 allegations that Iraq had access to weapons of mass destruction, which were used by George W. Bush's administration as the most prominent rationale for the Iraq War.

In October 2019, Taibbi argued that the whistleblower in the Trump–Ukraine scandal was not a "real whistleblower" because the whistleblower would have had their life affected by prosecution or being sent to prison. Taibbi also quoted former CIA analyst Robert Baer who argued that the whistleblower was part of a "palace coup against Trump".

Hunter Biden Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, Taibbi said that the problem "is not even so much whether or not that story was important or whether it was terribly damning, it was more the behavior of the media during that story that was really troubling. Not just turning a blind eye to it being suppressed, but also as we found out, planning these what they call a tabletop exercise to 'How should we all respond when this story comes out?'".

In late 2025, Taibbi filed a defamation lawsuit against journalist Eoin Higgins and Hachette Books over Higgins' book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. Taibbi explained his decision in The Free Press, stating "I’ve never taken money from [Elon] Musk or any other 'tech billionaire on the right. The case was dismissed on May 5, 2026.

Personal life Taibbi is married to Jeanne, a family physician. They have three children.

Taibbi previously lived in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Awards

2008: The National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary" for Rolling Stone columns.