1. Matthew Colin Taibbi is an American author, journalist and podcaster.
57 Facts About Matt Taibbi
1. 2.
Matt Taibbi has reported on finance, media, politics and sports.
3.
Matt Taibbi later worked as a sports journalist for the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times.
4.
In 2002, Matt Taibbi returned to the United States and founded the Buffalo-based newspaper The Beast.
5.
Matt Taibbi left a year later to work as a columnist for the New York Press.
6.
In 2008, Matt Taibbi won a National Magazine Award for three columns he wrote for Rolling Stone.
7.
Matt 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.
8.
In recent years, Matt Taibbi's writing has focused on culture war issues and cancel culture.
9.
Matt Taibbi has criticized mainstream media including its coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
10.
Between 2022 and 2023, Matt Taibbi released several installments of the Twitter Files.
11.
Matt Taibbi has authored several books, including The Great Derangement ; Griftopia ; The Divide ; Insane Clown President ; I Can't Breathe ; and Hate Inc.
12.
Matt Taibbi was born in 1970 in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
13.
Matt Taibbi's father, Mike Matt 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.
14.
Mike Matt Taibbi was adopted by an Italian-American couple in New York.
15.
Matt Taibbi has claimed Irish descent through his mother, Siobhan Walsh.
16.
Matt Taibbi's parents separated when he was young and he was largely raised by his mother.
17.
Matt Taibbi 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.
18.
Matt Taibbi spent a year abroad studying at Leningrad Polytechnic University, where he finished his credits for graduation from Bard.
19.
Matt Taibbi was deported in 1992 for writing an article for the Associated Press that was critical of President Islam Karimov.
20.
At the time of his deportation, Matt Taibbi was the starting left fielder for the Uzbekistan national baseball team.
21.
Matt Taibbi moved to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for a time in the 1990s, where he played professional basketball in the Mongolian Basketball Association.
22.
Matt Taibbi later contracted pneumonia and returned to Boston for surgery.
23.
Matt Taibbi worked for a short time as an investigator at a Boston-based private detective agency.
24.
Matt Taibbi lived and worked in Russia and the former USSR for more than six years.
25.
Apart from The eXile, Matt Taibbi was employed by the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times, where he worked as a sports editor for five months.
26.
Matt Taibbi contributed to Komsomolskaya Pravda, Trud, Stringer and Kommersant.
27.
Matt Taibbi later stated that he was addicted to heroin while he did this early writing.
28.
Matt Taibbi left the paper in August 2005, shortly after his editor Jeff Koyen was forced out over the article.
29.
Matt 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".
30.
Matt Taibbi said he was surprised at the vehement reactions to what he wrote "in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze".
31.
In February 2008, Matt Taibbi contributed a three-minute segment to Real Time with Bill Maher in which he interviewed residents of Youngstown, Ohio before the Ohio primary.
32.
Matt Taibbi was invited as a guest on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show and other MSNBC programs.
33.
Matt Taibbi has appeared on the Thom Hartmann radio and television shows and the Imus in the Morning Show on the Fox Business network.
34.
Matt Taibbi wrote a column, "The Sports Blotter", for the free weekly newspaper, The Boston Phoenix.
35.
Matt Taibbi covered legal troubles involving professional and amateur athletes.
36.
Matt Taibbi wrote a weekly political online column, "The Low Post", for the magazine's website.
37.
Matt Taibbi covered the 2008 United States presidential election in Year of the Rat, a special Rolling Stone diary.
38.
Matt Taibbi 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.
39.
In February 2014, Matt Taibbi left Rolling Stone and joined First Look Media to head a financial and political corruption-focused publication, Racket.
40.
In March 2021, Matt Taibbi announced that Useful Idiots would no longer be released by Rolling Stone and would be self-published.
41.
In 2018, Matt 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.
42.
Matt Taibbi stated that he would continue to contribute print features for Rolling Stone and maintain the Useful Idiots podcast with Katie Halper.
43.
Matt 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.
44.
Matt Taibbi is one of the most popular writers on Substack and earns much more from the platform than he did writing for Rolling Stone.
45.
On December 2,2022, Matt Taibbi began tweeting about and screenshotting emails that executives of Twitter sent each other concerning content moderation in 2020.
46.
Matt Taibbi's report was in the form of a Twitter thread with screen shots of email exchanges between Twitter executives.
47.
Matt Taibbi noted, "in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions" that he did not specify.
48.
Jeffrey Blehar, writing for National Review, said that Matt 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".
49.
Matt 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.
50.
The next day, Matt 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.
51.
Matt Taibbi received a visit from Internal Revenue Service agents the day he testified to Congress about the Twitter Files.
52.
Matt Taibbi later said Musk had been "very disappointing" on the issue of free speech.
53.
Since the mid-2010s, Matt Taibbi's reporting has increasingly focused on culture war topics and cancel culture.
54.
Matt Taibbi has criticized mainstream media and their coverage of Donald Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
55.
Matt Taibbi's writing has since polarized readers and fellow journalists.
56.
Matt Taibbi argues that both sides of the political media spectrum are complicit in dividing the country and fueling hate.
57.
Matt Taibbi quoted former CIA analyst Robert Baer who argued that the whistleblower was part of a "palace coup against Trump".