Matt Taibbi

Matthew Colin Taibbi (born March 2, 1970) is an American author, journalist, and podcaster.

He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports.

A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he is the author of several books, former co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast, and publisher of the Racket News (formerly TK News) on Substack.

Taibbi began as a freelance reporter working in the former Soviet Union.

He later worked as a sports journalist for the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times.

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 has also claimed 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.

In the early 1990s, Taibbi moved from Saint Petersburg to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he began selling news articles more regularly.

Taibbi moved to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for a time in the 1990s, 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 returned to Boston for surgery.

Taibbi also worked for a short time as an investigator at a Boston-based private detective agency.

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.

He was deported in 1992 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 Uzbek national baseball team.

Taibbi first moved to Russia in 1992.

He lived and worked in Russia and the former USSR for more than six years.

In 1997, Taibbi and Mark Ames co-edited the tabloid newspaper The eXile.

In 1997, he left the tabloid 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.

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.

His work often has drawn comparisons to the gonzo journalism of writer Hunter S. Thompson, who also covered politics for Rolling Stone.

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).

He has criticized mainstream media including its coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.

In 2022–23, Taibbi released several installments of the Twitter Files.

In 2019, he launched the podcast Useful Idiots, co-hosted by Katie Halper.

In 2020, he announced that he would no longer release his writing through Rolling Stone and had begun self-publishing his online writing on Substack.

In recent years, Taibbi's writing has focused on culture war issues and cancel culture.