Matthew Colin Taibbi (; born March 2, 1970) is an American author, journalist and podcaster. A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he is the author of several books and publisher of Racket News (formerly TK News). He has reported on finance, media, politics and sports.
Taibbi began as a freelance reporter working in Russia. He later worked as a sports journalist for the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times. In 1997, Taibbi and Mark Ames co-edited the tabloid newspaper The eXile. In 2002, Taibbi returned to the United States and founded the Buffalo-based newspaper The Beast. He left a year later to work as a columnist for the New York Press.
In 2004, Taibbi began covering politics for Rolling Stone. In 2008, Taibbi won a National Magazine Award for three columns he wrote for Rolling Stone. Taibbi became known for his brazen style, having branded Goldman Sachs a "vampire squid" in a 2009 article about the Wall Street firm's outsized role in the 2008 financial crisis. His work often has drawn comparisons to the gonzo journalism of writer Hunter S. Thompson, who also covered politics for Rolling Stone. In 2019, he launched the podcast Useful Idiots, co-hosted by Katie Halper, before leaving in 2022, where he was succeeded by Aaron Maté. In 2020, he announced that he would no longer release his writing through Rolling Stone and had begun self-publishing his online writing. In recent years, Taibbi's writing has focused on culture war issues and cancel culture. He has criticized mainstream media including its coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Between 2022 and 2023, Taibbi released several installments of the Twitter Files.
Taibbi has authored several books, including The Great Derangement (2009); Griftopia (2010); The Divide (2014); Insane Clown President (2017); I Can't Breathe (2017); and Hate Inc. (2019).
Contents
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.
Taibbi grew up in the Boston suburbs. His parents separated when he was young and he was largely raised by his mother. Because Taibbi was troubled with behavioral and academic problems, his parents sent him to Concord Academy. 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 spent a year abroad studying at Leningrad Polytechnic University, where he finished his credits for graduation from Bard.
Career
Russia
After completing his college work midsemester, Taibbi moved to New York City where he spent two months working as a waiter to save money for a plane ticket to Russia. In 1992, missing his college graduation, Taibbi moved to Saint Petersburg. Seven months later, Taibbi moved to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he began selling news articles more regularly. He returned to Saint Petersburg five months later, after being deported by the Uzbek secret police for writing an article for the Associated Press that was critical of President Islam Karimov. At the time of his deportation, Taibbi was the starting left fielder for the Uzbekistan national baseball team. Six months later, Taibbi moved to Moscow to take a job at the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times, where he worked as a sports editor for five months.
Taibbi moved back to the U.S. doing part-time landscaping work before suffering a nervous breakdown and moving north, where he had an affair with a married woman. He then moved back to Russia to play pro baseball for two Russian clubs, Spartak, and the Red Army, in 1995. After five months in Russia, Taibbi moved back to the East Coast, where he worked as an investigator at a Boston-based private detective agency. After seven months as a private detective, Taibbi moved to Russia to "write a book about serial murder" and began working for The Moscow Times again, as a news reporter. He returned to the U.S. again after five months to resume his relationship with the divorcée but they broke up and Taibbi returned to Russia to work for The Moscow Times for the third time. He initially planned to return to America in the summer of 1996 to rekindle their relationship, but found himself too busy covering the 1996 Russian presidential election.
Taibbi then moved to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, where he played professional basketball in the Mongolian Basketball Association (MBA). Taibbi became known as "The Mongolian Rodman", was paid $100/month to play, and said he also hosted a radio show while there. He later contracted pneumonia and, in early January 1997, returned to Boston for surgery to correct an empyema. Doctors had suspected he was infected with bacterial meningitis, but later determined he was only a carrier of the bacteria and he recovered after a course of antibiotics.
Shortly after his 27th birthday in March 1997, Taibbi returned to Moscow to take on a job as editor of the tabloid Living Here, which had gone defunct at the time. That same year, he left the Living Here and joined Mark Ames to co-edit the English-language Moscow-based, bi-weekly free newspaper, The eXile, which was written primarily for the city's expatriate community. The eXile's tone and content were highly controversial. For example, a regular column reported on a member of staff at The eXile hiring a Russian prostitute and then writing a long "review" of the woman and the details of the sexual encounter. Its content was considered either brutally honest and gleefully tasteless or juvenile, misogynistic and even cruel.
United States
In 2002, he returned to the United States to start the satirical bi-weekly The Beast in Buffalo, New York. He left that publication a year later, commenting: "Running a business and writing is too much." Taibbi continued as a freelancer for The Nation, Playboy, New York Press (where he wrote a regular political column for more than two years), Rolling Stone, and New York Sports Express (as editor-at-large).
In March 2005, Taibbi's satirical essay, "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope", 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. He covered legal troubles involving professional and amateur athletes.
In 2004, Taibbi began covering politics for Rolling Stone. A contributing editor, he wrote feature-length articles on domestic and international affairs. He also wrote a weekly political online column, "The Low Post", for the magazine's website.
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".
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.
Taibbi continued publishing the novel on a Substack website that he titled initially The Taibbi Report and then The Fairway. 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.
In April 2020, Taibbi announced he would no longer publish his online writing through Rolling Stone, and henceforth, would publish his online writing independently. He stated that he would continue to contribute print features for Rolling Stone and maintain the Useful Idiots podcast with Katie Halper. (In April 2021, Useful Idiots, under its same name, but with some support staff changes, also would move to self-publication.) Taibbi stated that his decision to move his writing to a self-published newsletter service was made independently and that he was not asked to leave Rolling Stone. 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. On January 24, 2023, the name was changed from TK News to 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.
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.
Media
Taibbi argues that both sides of the political media spectrum are complicit in dividing the country and fueling hate. In 2019, Taibbi self-published the book Hate Inc., a critique of the mainstream media landscape. 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".
In response to the March 30, 2023, indictment of Donald Trump, Taibbi said, "If presidents think they will be chased into jail under thin pretexts as ex-presidents, they'll try even harder to never leave office. This is how autocracies are born."
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?'".
Reception
In 2021, Ross Barkan of New York wrote, "Taibbi is—or was, depending on your view—one of the most celebrated investigative journalists of his generation." He continued, "Taibbi's critics view him as a reporter turned red-pilled culture warrior chasing subscriptions", while "Taibbi's defenders say he hasn't changed. Rather, it's the world that has grown more illiberal and hysterical." Taibbi argued that he had not changed, but rather that reactions to Trump had "fundamentally changed the business". In 2023, Nick Gillespie of Reason wrote that when Taibbi attacked Hillary Clinton "as a sellout, argued that the Russiagate narrative was mostly bullshit, and equated the manipulative tactics of right and left media personalities, progressives gave him the cold shoulder."
Defamation lawsuits
On April 1, 2025, U.S. Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove accused Taibbi of being a "serial sexual harrasser" during a hearing on a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. On April 3, Taibbi announced a $10 million libel suit against her.
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. As of 2021, he lives in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey.
In a 2008 interview with Hemant Mehta for Patheos, Taibbi described himself as an "atheist/agnostic".
Awards
2008: The National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary" for Rolling Stone columns.