Tech writer Eoin Higgins and Hachette Book Group in February published Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. The cover depicts a hand with marionette strings, suggesting that the main subjects of the book—fellow reporter Glenn Greenwald and myself—are puppets controlled by Big Tech overlords such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks.
Higgins’s case against me concerns my involvement with the Twitter Files—a trove of the social media website’s internal communications that Musk sent to reporters, including me, after he acquired the company in 2022. I took significant heat for my coverage, which included Twitter employees’ deliberations about whether to suppress the report about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 election. IRS agents made an unannounced visit to my home the day I testified in Congress about my findings, and delegate Stacey Plaskett falsely accused me of perjury and threatened to jail me.
Despite this, Higgins says I sold out—literally—by working on the Twitter Files. He claims that I “fully dispensed with any pretense of challenging power” after having “cash[ed] in” with my “benefactor,” Musk.
I’ve never taken money from Musk or any other “tech billionaire on the right,” as Higgins implies. And his lie isn’t harmless. The impressions of trading content for cash—or “selling jeans,” as the Russians call it—is extremely damaging to a reporter’s reputation. So I sued Higgins and Bold Type Books, a division of Hachette, in November for defamation.
I kept the lawsuit largely between us, but Higgins went public recently with a post on his Substack complaining, “Yes, I’m being sued by Matt Taibbi.” The post set off a wave of jeers from the online left-wing peanut gallery, who claim to think my legal challenge clashes with my avowed commitment to freedom of speech. “Not the guy free speech guy [sic]”, said influencer Sabrina “Sabby Sabs” Salvati, adding a laugh emoji. “Even if you disagree with Eoin’s book’s conclusion that Taibbi has sold out, it should be legal to make that criticism and Taibbi should respond by rebutting the claim not running to the courts,” said Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson, among many other critics.
