Matt Taibbi is one of American journalism’s most combustible talents – a writer who built his reputation by calling out Wall Street, exposing the inner workings of Twitter’s content moderation, and spending the last decade making both the left and the right deeply uncomfortable. He’s based in New Jersey and is currently running Racket News, a Substack newsletter with over 454,000 subscribers that has become one of the most-read independent political publications in the United States.
Biography
Matthew Colin Taibbi was born on 2 March 1970 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. His background is more complicated than his Italian-sounding surname suggests. His father, Mike Taibbi, was born Loren Ames Denny in Honolulu to a Filipino-Hawaiian mother, before being adopted as a child by Salvatore and Gaetana Taibbi, an Italian-American couple in New York. Matt has acknowledged that the Taibbi surname has Sicilian and Lebanese roots, but that he’s not of either descent since his father was adopted. Through his mother, Nancy, he has Irish heritage.
Mike Taibbi went on to become a respected NBC News and Dateline NBC correspondent, retiring in 2014 with a national Emmy, more than 30 local Emmys, and four Edward R. Murrow Awards. Growing up in Boston’s suburbs with that kind of journalistic pedigree in the family, it’s perhaps not surprising that Matt eventually found his way into the business — though the path he took was anything but straightforward.
His parents separated when he was young, and he was largely raised by his mother. Behavioral and academic difficulties led his parents to enroll him at Concord Academy in Massachusetts. He started at New York University but struggled with the scale of city life, eventually transferring to Bard College in upstate New York, where he graduated in 1992. During his studies, he spent a year abroad at Leningrad Polytechnic University, completing his graduation credits while Russia was in the midst of an extraordinary political upheaval.
Career
After Bard, Taibbi spent two months waiting tables in New York to save enough for a plane ticket, then moved to St. Petersburg in 1992, missing his own graduation ceremony in the process. What followed was years of freelance journalism, professional sport, and genuine adventure. He was deported from Uzbekistan after writing a critical piece about President Islam Karimov for the Associated Press (at the time, he was the starting left fielder for Uzbekistan’s national baseball team). He moved to Mongolia and played professional basketball for a spell, earning the nickname “The Mongolian Rodman” on a $ 100-a-month salary. He contracted pneumonia there and returned to Boston in early 1997 for surgery, having come dangerously close to a serious illness.
By March 1997, he was back in Moscow, co-founding the English-language tabloid The eXile with writer Mark Ames. The paper was deliberately provocative, written for the city’s expatriate community, and built a reputation for content that was either brutally honest or spectacularly offensive, depending on your perspective. Their joint book, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, published in 2000, later attracted controversy when passages describing sexual harassment of staff were re-examined in 2017. Taibbi apologized for the language in the book and maintained that the most contentious passages were satirical fiction rather than factual reporting.
He returned to the United States in 2002 and founded The Beast, a satirical bi-weekly in Buffalo, New York, before moving on to write columns for the New York Press. Then, in 2004, Rolling Stone came calling.
His years at Rolling Stone defined him publicly. He won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary in 2008, and in 2009 published what became his most famous single piece of writing: a long investigation into Goldman Sachs following the 2008 financial crisis, in which he branded the bank “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” That phrase entered the political lexicon and stuck. His work drew consistent comparisons to Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism, not least because both men covered politics for the same magazine with the same contempt for official narratives.
Taibbi briefly left Rolling Stone in February 2014 to head a new corruption-focused publication, Racket, under First Look Media, but management disputes killed the project before it launched, and he returned to Rolling Stone that October. He launched the podcast Useful Idiots with Katie Halper in August 2019, and in April 2020 announced he’d be self-publishing his online writing through Substack, while continuing to contribute features to the magazine in print. His newsletter went through several name changes — The Taibbi Report, The Fairway, TK News — before settling on Racket News on 24 January 2023. By October 2021, it had more than 30,000 paying subscribers. As of May 2026, the Substack profile shows over 454,000 total subscribers, with Racket News ranked 12th in U.S. Politics on the platform.
The Twitter Files, beginning on 2 December 2022, were the most consequential chapter of his Substack years. Elon Musk, having acquired Twitter in October 2022, provided Taibbi and other journalists with access to internal company documents related to content moderation decisions. Taibbi published more than half of the eventual 19-plus installments himself, covering subjects from the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story to alleged FBI and CIA involvement in Twitter’s moderation policies. On the morning of 9 March 2023, the day he testified before the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, IRS agents made an unannounced visit to his home. A subsequent House Judiciary investigation established that the IRS had opened an examination of his 2018 tax return on Christmas Eve 2022, three weeks after the first Twitter Files thread. The case was closed in Taibbi’s favor, with the IRS confirming that he owed nothing and was, in fact, due a refund.
His relationship with Musk later soured. In February 2024, Taibbi disclosed that Musk had sent him a message reading: “You are dead to me. Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack.” Taibbi subsequently described Musk as “very disappointing on the issue of free speech.”
In 2025, Taibbi filed two defamation lawsuits. The first, a $10 million libel action against U.S. Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove, followed her statement during a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on 1 April 2025 in which she called him a “serial sexual harasser.” Taibbi filed suit on 3 April 2025 in the District of New Jersey, arguing that her re-publication of the video on social media stripped the statement of any legislative immunity. That case remained active as of late 2025. The second suit, against journalist Eoin Higgins and Hachette’s Bold Type Books imprint over the book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, was dismissed on 5 May 2026 by S.D.N.Y. Judge George B. Daniels, who ruled the book’s language constituted non-actionable opinion and metaphor.
Personal Life
Taibbi married Jeanne Manubay, a New Jersey family physician, in 2010. They have three sons together: Max, Nathaniel (named after the author H.H. Munro, who wrote under the pen name Saki), and Ezekiel. The family previously lived in Jersey City before purchasing a home at 9 Van Duyne Road in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, in September 2019 for $1,037,500. He has described his religious views as “atheist/agnostic.”
He’s the author of ten books, including four New York Times bestsellers: The Great Derangement (2008), Griftopia (2010), The Divide (2014), and Insane Clown President (2017). His 2017 book I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street was named a Washington Post Top-10 Book of the Year.
Net Worth
No reputable financial publication has published a verified net worth figure for Matt Taibbi.
The most credible on-record statement came during court arguments in March 2026, when opposing counsel in the Higgins defamation case told the presiding judge that Taibbi “has made millions from his Substack.” Given that Racket News has over 454,000 subscribers at a standard rate of $7 per month or $70 per year, annual gross income from the newsletter alone, running into the low-to-mid seven figures, is plausible. Add book royalties from four NYT bestsellers, speaking fees, and podcast revenue, and most informed industry estimates place his net worth somewhere in the $5 million to $10 million range.
