Note on a Lawsuit

A brief note on a sordid affair.

Recently author Eoin Higgins took to his Substack platform to complain, “Yes, I’m Being Sued by Matt Taibbi.” He wrote a book called Owned with a cover illustration showing marionette strings controlling people like me and Glenn Greenwald, the main subjects of his book, depicted me as “bought” by “tech billionaires on the right.” Though I’ve never taken any money from “tech billionaires on the right” and am entirely dependent on subscribers to this site, the suit was something Higgins felt needed celebrating.

Racket readers went through this when a member of congress called me a “serial sexual harrasser” last summer. Not wanting to pull a late-stage Lenny Bruce on a faithful audience the original plan was not to say anything. When The Free Press asked for a response, though, I gave one, published today. You can check it out if you like. One point left out is the main reason I felt I had to go to court.

Higgins somehow dismisses as an act of self-interest the key moment in my relationship with Elon Musk, when I refused to leave Substack and move to his new Twitter subs program. Elon was angry then about Substack’s new Notes feature, which he felt was an attempt to “kill Twitter,” so he began disabling Substack links not just for me but every Substack contributor, including ironically Eoin Higgins.

I would have done just about anything to keep working on the Twitter Files, but what Elon was asking — I still don’t think he understands this — would have looked like financial ties, which was enough undercut the reporting. I had no choice but to say no. When our exchanges were made public, these dynamics came out. Elon argued that if I moved to Twitter I’d “get far more subscribers,” but I still said no, because “people would essentially say I’m an employee of Twitter” and “both of us would never hear the end of it.” Also, the optics would be “really bad, journalistic ethics-wise.” Elon replied, “Then I guess it’s goodbye,” making clear I’d cut myself off:

If I’d been the marionetted mercenary Higgins and Hachette books claim I am, I’d have accepted Elon’s offer without a thought, put myself on Twitter subs, and kept cranking out Twitter Files stories. Instead I refused the inducement of “far more subscribers” to avoid the appearance of a financial relationship, and lost a great story because I was being asked to go to a place I felt I couldn’t go, “journalistic ethics-wise.”

This was a by-the-book example of what you have to do in such a situation, about which I consulted with older journalists. According to Higgins, though, it was motivated by greed. In Owned he writes that it was a “threat to Taibbi’s bottom line that finally motivated the journalist to act,” and I only protested the treatment of Substack because Musk was “threatening [my] subscription growth.” This makes no sense. Me staying at Substack was not an option for Elon. It was made clear there was only one way I could stay on that story, and I couldn’t do it, and that was that.

No one should get a medal for following basic standards, and I didn’t ask for one. However if for ethical reasons you have to give up a big story by standing up to a billionaire, it’s not a lot to ask that a major corporate publisher not subsequently describe you as a “bought” and “owned” puppet who literally sold his soul to that same billionaire. I didn’t make a big deal of this costly move because I think people should make decisions based only on whether or not they’re right, and not for credit, which means I was originally fine with people not noticing. But if you take advantage of that instinct to sell a book accusing me of bad ethics, what can I do but sue?

Higgins is having fun with this. He’s having a grand old time, laughing about smearing someone with corporate backing, and what a big joke it is that he should have to be careful with someone who’s “made no secret” of “ideological affiliation with the Republican Party.” Proof of the latter includes — this isn’t a joke — the fact that I once wrote a column called “Thanksgiving is Awesome” that made fun of Howard Zinn. These people are so nuts, they think you need a payoff to like Thanksgiving. They also think people with the wrong politics don’t deserve even the very low level of reputational care the law requires. This kind of person doesn’t care about being wrong, so courts are the only recourse. It sucks, but what else can you do?