Matt Taibbi

Matthew C. Taibbi (born March 2, 1970) is an American investigative journalist, author , and podcaster noted for his acerbic critiques of financial elites, political institutions, and media orthodoxies. The son of television reporter Mike Taibbi and a lawyer, he spent much of his early adulthood in the former Soviet Union , where he co-edited the English-language newspaper The eXile and honed a gonzo style of journalism influenced by Russian literature . Returning to the United States in 2002, Taibbi joined Rolling Stone as a contributing editor, earning a National Magazine Award in 2008 for columns exposing Wall Street excesses, such as dubbing Goldman Sachs a "great vampire squid ."

Taibbi's books, including the New York Times bestsellers Griftopia (2010), which dissected the 2008 financial crisis , and Hate Inc. (2019), which analyzed media's role in polarizing society, established him as a leading voice on economic inequality and journalistic malpractice. In 2020, he transitioned to independent publishing via Substack , launching Racket News to pursue unfiltered reporting amid growing institutional pressures on dissent. His involvement in the Twitter Files beginning in 2022—releasing internal documents that detailed platform censorship of the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story and coordination with federal agencies—drew both acclaim for transparency and backlash from legacy media outlets, highlighting fractures in journalistic consensus. Taibbi received the 2020 Izzy Award for independent media excellence and the 2023 Dao Prize for investigative journalism , underscoring his commitment to empirical scrutiny over ideological alignment.

Matt Taibbi was born in New Jersey to Mike Taibbi , a television journalist who reported for NBC and other networks, and his wife, when his parents were both around 20 years old and his father was a student at Rutgers University . The family relocated to the Boston area shortly after, where Taibbi spent much of his childhood in the suburbs as an only child .

His father's career immersed Taibbi in the journalism world from an early age; Mike Taibbi , originally born Loren Ames Denny in Hawaii to a Filipino-Hawaiian mother before being adopted as a child by an Italian-American couple, Salvatore and Gaetana Taibbi, worked as a reporter in Boston and beyond, exposing his son to newsrooms, reporters, and the rigors of broadcast work. Taibbi later described growing up around television and print journalists, noting the influence of his father's professional environment, which included a stepmother who anchored at CNN .

This upbringing fostered an early familiarity with media dynamics but also a sense of alienation in suburban Boston , amid a household shaped by his father's demanding career and complex family history of adoption and ethnic blending.

Taibbi attended Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York , where he initially pursued studies in the literature department. During his senior year, he transferred to Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University) in Russia for a study abroad program, driven by his fascination with Russian literature . This experience immersed him in the cultural milieu of authors he admired, including Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Leo Tolstoy , whose satirical and realist styles shaped his early aspirations toward writing fiction and humor.

He graduated from Bard College in 1991, having honed skills in creative writing and analysis through exposure to Russian literary traditions that emphasized critique of power and society . Taibbi's academic shift toward Russia reflected early influences from Soviet-era dissident voices and humorists, whom he emulated in short stories written during college, foreshadowing his later journalistic focus on institutional corruption.