Wikipedia Deep Dive

Matt Taibbi

14 min read

In 2009, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine published a sentence that would become one of the most quoted descriptions of Wall Street in American history. He called Goldman Sachs "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." The phrase captured something that millions of Americans were feeling in the aftermath of the financial crisis but couldn't quite articulate. That writer was Matt Taibbi, and his career—spanning from playing professional basketball in Mongolia to becoming one of the most controversial journalists of his generation—is one of the strangest trajectories in modern American media.

The Wandering Years

Matt Taibbi was born in 1970 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. His father, Mike Taibbi, was an NBC television reporter with a complicated heritage—adopted by an Italian-American couple, his biological mother was of mixed Filipino and Native Hawaiian descent, while his biological father was likely an American serviceman. The surname Taibbi is Sicilian with Lebanese roots, though Matt himself has no actual connection to either Sicily or Lebanon due to his father's adoption. Through his mother, he claims Irish ancestry.

His childhood was turbulent. His parents separated when he was young, and behavioral and academic problems led them to send him to Concord Academy, a private boarding school in Massachusetts. He started at New York University but found himself overwhelmed by the anonymity of being "just one of thousands of faces in a city of millions." He transferred to Bard College, a small liberal arts school in upstate New York, and spent a year abroad at Leningrad Polytechnic University in the Soviet Union.

What happened next reads like a picaresque novel.

After finishing his degree requirements mid-semester in 1992, Taibbi worked as a waiter in New York City just long enough to save money for a plane ticket to Russia. He missed his own college graduation to move to Saint Petersburg. Seven months later, he relocated to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where he began selling freelance news articles more regularly. But his writing got him into trouble—an article critical of Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov, published by the Associated Press, earned him deportation by the Uzbek secret police.

Here's where the story gets strange. At the time of his deportation, Taibbi was the starting left fielder for the Uzbekistan national baseball team.

He bounced back to Saint Petersburg, then to Moscow to work as a sports editor at The Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper. Then back to America for landscaping work. Then a nervous breakdown. Then an affair with a married woman. Then back to Russia to play professional baseball for two Russian clubs—Spartak and the Red Army team. Then back to Boston to work as a private detective. Then back to Russia to "write a book about serial murder." The woman he'd been seeing had gotten divorced, and he planned to return to America to be with her, but he got too busy covering the 1996 Russian presidential election.

Then he moved to Mongolia.

The Mongolian Rodman

In Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, Taibbi played professional basketball in the Mongolian Basketball Association. He earned the nickname "The Mongolian Rodman"—a reference to Dennis Rodman, the flamboyant NBA player known for his rebounding and outlandish behavior. Taibbi was paid a hundred dollars a month and claims he also hosted a radio show during this period.

The Mongolia adventure ended badly. He contracted pneumonia and developed empyema, a condition where pus accumulates in the space between the lung and the inner surface of the chest wall. Doctors initially suspected bacterial meningitis, a potentially fatal infection of the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord. In early January 1997, he returned to Boston for surgery. It turned out he was merely a carrier of the meningitis bacteria, not actively infected, and he recovered after a course of antibiotics.

By this point, Taibbi was twenty-seven years old. He had lived in Russia multiple times, been deported from Uzbekistan, played professional sports on three different teams in two different sports in three different countries, worked as a private detective, and nearly died in Mongolia. He had not yet begun what would become his actual career.

The eXile

Shortly after his twenty-seventh birthday, Taibbi returned to Moscow to edit a tabloid called Living Here, which had gone defunct. When that didn't work out, he joined forces with another American writer named Mark Ames to co-edit a new publication: The eXile, an English-language, biweekly free newspaper aimed at Moscow's expatriate community.

The eXile was not like other newspapers.

Its tone was deliberately provocative, often crossing lines that mainstream publications wouldn't approach. One regular column featured a staff member hiring a Russian prostitute and then writing a detailed "review" of the woman and the sexual encounter. Defenders called the publication brutally honest and gleefully tasteless. Critics called it juvenile, misogynistic, and cruel. Both descriptions were probably accurate.

Taibbi wrote in both English and Russian during this period, also contributing to Russian publications like Komsomolskaya Pravda and Kommersant. In 2000, he and Ames published a book about their experiences, titled The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia. A film adaptation was briefly in development but never materialized.

Years later, Taibbi would admit that he was addicted to heroin during this period of his life.

The book would come back to haunt him. In 2017, during the broader cultural reckoning of the MeToo movement, Taibbi faced criticism for excerpts describing sexual harassment of employees at The eXile. In a Facebook post, he apologized for the "cruel and misogynistic language" and claimed the work was conceived as satire of the "reprehensible" behavior of American expatriates in Russia—that the descriptions were "fictional and not true."

The situation was murky. The book had been published as nonfiction, but emails obtained by Paste magazine included a letter from the 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 the magazine that the sexual harassment described never happened and that it was a "ridiculous passage written by Mark."

Nevertheless, Penguin Random House dropped Taibbi as an author after the controversy.

Return to America

In 2002, Taibbi came back to the United States to start The Beast, a satirical biweekly newspaper in Buffalo, New York. He left after a year, explaining: "Running a business and writing is too much."

He freelanced for various publications—The Nation, Playboy, the New York Press—before landing at Rolling Stone in 2004. There, he found his voice and his audience.

The match made sense. Rolling Stone had a history of publishing gonzo journalism, the wild, first-person, boundary-blurring style pioneered by Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson had covered politics for Rolling Stone in the 1970s, including a legendary account of the 1972 presidential campaign. Taibbi's aggressive, profane, highly personal approach to political writing fit naturally into that tradition.

Not everyone appreciated his style. In March 2005, he published a satirical essay in the New York Press titled "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope." The piece was denounced by, among others, Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Matt Drudge, and Anthony Weiner. Taibbi defended it as "off-the-cuff burlesque of truly tasteless jokes," intended to give readers a break from his political essays. He also admitted he had written it "in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze."

His temper was legendary. In 2010, journalist James Verini was interviewing Taibbi at a Manhattan restaurant for Vanity Fair. When Verini told Taibbi that he found The Exile "redundant and discursive," Taibbi reportedly became enraged, threw his coffee in Verini's face along with an expletive, followed him half a block after he left the restaurant, and said, "I still haven't decided what I'm going to do with you!" Taibbi later described this as "an aberration from how I've behaved in the last six or seven years."

The Vampire Squid

If there's a single moment that defined Taibbi's career, it came in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

To understand why his Goldman Sachs piece hit so hard, you need to understand what had just happened to America. In 2007 and 2008, the housing market collapsed, taking much of the financial system with it. Banks that had made fortunes selling complex mortgage-backed securities suddenly found themselves on the brink of bankruptcy. The federal government stepped in with hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts. Millions of Americans lost their homes, their jobs, their retirement savings. The recession that followed was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

And yet, somehow, the people who had created the crisis seemed to emerge largely unscathed. Executives at the banks that had needed bailouts continued to receive enormous bonuses. Almost no one went to jail.

Into this environment came Taibbi's 2009 Rolling Stone article, with its unforgettable opening image of Goldman Sachs as a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity." The phrase captured a widespread sense that the financial industry was not just reckless or greedy, but parasitic—extracting wealth from the real economy without producing anything of value.

The "vampire squid" metaphor entered the lexicon. In financial and political media, it came to represent the perception of banks and investment firms as entities that "sabotage production" and "sink the economy as they suck the life out of it in the form of rent." The real vampire squid, incidentally, is a small, harmless deep-sea creature that feeds on marine snow—drifting organic particles. It's one of the least threatening animals in the ocean. But the image Taibbi conjured was irresistible.

In 2008, he won a National Magazine Award for three columns he'd written for Rolling Stone. He was becoming one of the most recognizable political journalists in the country.

The Foreclosure Courts

Taibbi's financial reporting wasn't limited to colorful insults. He did serious investigative work on how the crisis affected ordinary Americans.

One particularly revealing story took him to Jacksonville, Florida, to observe what was called a "rocket docket"—a court system designed to process foreclosures as quickly as possible. Banks were trying to repossess homes at an unprecedented rate, and the courts had set up special expedited procedures to handle the volume.

Taibbi was brought in to observe a hearing with attorney April Charney, who represented homeowners facing foreclosure. What he found disturbed him. The courts, he concluded, were processing foreclosures without proper regard for whether the underlying financial instruments were legally valid. Many of the loans in question had been sliced up and repackaged so many times that it was unclear who actually owned them. Documents were frequently forged or "robo-signed"—rubber-stamped by employees who had no idea what they were signing.

The system, as Taibbi saw it, was designed to move properties quickly from homeowners to banks, regardless of whether the banks had a legitimate legal claim to them. The fraudulent and predatory nature of many original loans was being obscured rather than addressed.

The Later Years

Taibbi briefly left Rolling Stone in 2014 to join First Look Media, the company founded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar that also published The Intercept. He was supposed to launch a new publication focused on financial and political corruption. But management disputes delayed and ultimately killed the project, and Taibbi returned to Rolling Stone later that year.

In 2019, he launched a political podcast called Useful Idiots, co-hosted with journalist Katie Halper. The show featured interviews with various guests including progressive commentators, journalists, and political figures.

But Taibbi was growing restless with traditional media. In 2020, he announced he would no longer publish his online writing through Rolling Stone and would instead self-publish through a newsletter platform. He named it TK News—after the journalism abbreviation "TK," which stands for "to come" and is used as a placeholder in manuscripts when information will be filled in later. The name was a signal: more would follow.

The newsletter was successful. By October 2021, TK News had more than thirty thousand paying subscribers. In January 2023, he renamed it Racket News.

The Twitter Files

In late 2022 and 2023, Taibbi's career took another turn when Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, gave him access to internal company documents. Taibbi published what became known as the "Twitter Files"—a series of reports based on these internal communications.

The documents, according to Taibbi's reporting, showed various instances of content moderation decisions at Twitter, including communications with government agencies about what content to suppress or highlight. The releases were controversial. Supporters saw them as evidence of inappropriate government influence over social media platforms. Critics argued that Taibbi was selectively presenting information to support a predetermined narrative, and that the documents showed nothing particularly unusual or scandalous about how a large social media company operated.

The Twitter Files represented a significant shift in Taibbi's focus. Where he had once concentrated on financial industry malfeasance, his recent work has centered on what he calls mainstream media failures and culture war issues, including what he sees as excessive concern about Russian interference in American elections.

A Writer in Full

Matt Taibbi has published numerous books over his career. Griftopia, from 2010, expanded on his financial crisis reporting. The Divide, published in 2014, examined how the American justice system treats rich and poor defendants differently. Insane Clown President, from 2017, collected his coverage of the Trump campaign. I Can't Breathe, also from 2017, told the story of Eric Garner, the Black man who died after a New York City police officer put him in a chokehold. Hate Inc., published in 2019, critiqued the modern media landscape.

He also published a novel, The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing: Adventures of the Unidentified Black Male, which he initially serialized via email subscriptions starting in 2018. It's described as fictional with true-crime elements.

His obituary of Andrew Breitbart, the conservative commentator who died in 2012, captured something essential about Taibbi's approach. The headline was "Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche." The text included the line: "Good! Fuck him. I couldn't be happier that he's dead." But Taibbi also called the piece "at least half an homage," acknowledging aspects of Breitbart's style he respected while noting that Breitbart himself had written a harsh obituary of Ted Kennedy.

Fans of Breitbart responded with threats and insults. Taibbi published them in a postscript.

The Shape of a Career

What do you make of a journalist who played on the Uzbekistan national baseball team, got nicknamed "The Mongolian Rodman," admitted to heroin addiction, threw coffee in another journalist's face, wrote one of the most memorable phrases in financial journalism, and ended up publishing internal Twitter documents for Elon Musk?

Taibbi represents a particular type of American writer—combative, itinerant, allergic to institutional constraints. His career path would have been impossible in an earlier era of journalism, when reporters climbed ladders at established newspapers and magazines. He found success precisely because he didn't fit anywhere, because his willingness to go anywhere and say anything gave him a perspective that more cautious writers lacked.

The Hunter S. Thompson comparisons are inevitable and not entirely off-base. Both wrote about politics with barely contained fury. Both embedded themselves in stories rather than pretending to observe from a neutral distance. Both had substance abuse problems. Both found their natural home at Rolling Stone.

But Thompson was writing in an era when his style was genuinely transgressive, when calling a presidential candidate a "worthless, brain-damaged old freak" was shocking. By the time Taibbi came along, outrage had become a commodity. Everyone was furious all the time. The question became whether fury could still illuminate anything, or whether it had become just another performance.

Taibbi's best work—the vampire squid piece, his foreclosure court reporting, his books on inequality and police violence—combined genuine investigative journalism with memorable prose. His worst work reads like an angry man yelling at clouds. The ratio between the two has shifted over the years, as it does for many writers who make their name on righteous indignation.

He turns fifty-five in 2025. He's been a baseball player, a basketball player, a private detective, a heroin addict, a magazine writer, a podcaster, and a newsletter publisher. He's been celebrated and canceled, often by the same people at different times. Whatever else you can say about Matt Taibbi, he's never been boring.