Eoin Higgins is the author of “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left” and publisher of his own Substack. I heard Higgins give a book talk last summer, found it really interesting, then took notice when Matt Taibbi, one of those “loud voices,” sued Higgins on ludicrous grounds. So I thought it would be interesting to have a conversation.
Trying a new technique for video: Posting to my YouTube channel, which I will gradually populate.
Transcript follows.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Eoin Higgins
(recorded 12/30/25)
Paul Krugman: Hi everyone, Paul Krugman again. Back on duty, with some fresh content this week. I’m talking to Eoin Higgins, who’s the author of a really interesting book called Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, although the issues covered go a lot broader than that.
To be honest, I was inspired to talk to Eoin, who I’ve met and talked with before, but this time on camera, because one of the voices on the left, Matt Taibbi—who is one of the subjects of the book—has sued Eoin. We will avoid saying anything that might somehow prejudice that lawsuit, although it is truly absurd.
Welcome to the show.
Eoin Higgins: Thank you for having me. A pleasure to talk.
Krugman: I should mention the book’s subtitle focuses on the voices on the Right—now on the Right, formerly on the Left—Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald in particular. But most of the book is really about the background and so on. Do you want to give a quick summary of the theme of the book?
Higgins: The book primarily traces Glenn Greenwald’s career as well as Matt Taibbi’s career, and in parallel talks about the Silicon Valley billionaires who are behind the Tech-Right movement that currently has taken over a lot of conservative politics in the US, and the book looks at these parallel tracks. When we get to around 2020 or so, they converge. The argument of the book is really looking at how the Silicon Valley right-wing were able to buy up the alternative media ecosystem and create something where they were able to take it over, and in doing so, provide the opportunity for people like Greenwald and people like Taibbi to make money on these platforms. Which then came with its own incentives to continue to flatter and work toward the interests of this cohort.
Krugman: We should mention that one of the things to talk about is Substack: one of the investors is Marc Andreessen, who is definitely part of the “broligarchy” or whatever we want to call it, and very much part of this whole thing, which does raise questions—we’ll talk a little bit about Substack later on.
Let’s just start. The emergence of the tech-right, it’s a really startling thing, right? Not that long ago Silicon Valley leaned—certainly on social issues—left and got along okay with at least a fair number of Democrats, now it’s gone. Tell me, what do you think is driving this?
Higgins: They’re kind of two different tracks here. One is that the industry being in California, the relative youth of a lot of the people who work in Silicon Valley and have worked there traditionally did make this a sector where the politics certainly seemed to be liberal—socially liberal, certainly. The people who were in charge, people like Andreessen, people like Musk, people like Peter Thiel, those who are running companies or investing in companies, big movers and shakers. Within this space, they’ve actually all always been relatively conservative. But it also hasn’t really been something—with the exception of Thiel—that really mattered until about 10 or 15 years ago.
Probably about ten years ago, there’s a shift in how they’re perceived. But up until then, most of the public discourse around the tech companies—most, not all—was pretty laudatory: “these are cool gadgets that they’re giving us. These are cool things that we have. This industry is doing a lot of good for the country and for the economy.” But around 2015 or so that really started to change. There’s a lot more criticism now. There had been some stuff earlier, Peter Thiel famously sued and tried to kill Gawker and successfully did because—among other things—they had outed him back in 2007-2008. He was angry about that and he launched a campaign that finally came to fruition in 2016 with taking down Gawker. This was because of the Valley Wag blog, which was a Gawker project that kind of treated the tech industry like a gossip blog. It was very critical, but this was for the most part the way that Silicon Valley was treated—I think the mainstream press was pretty laudatory.
Then around like ten years ago, 2014-2015, that started to change. In 2016, when Trump was elected, the part of the backlash to that election from the liberal mainstream and the Democratic Party was to look for reasons that this might have happened. One of the reasons that they really latched on to was social media, and social media are these companies that are controlled by these very powerful people in Silicon Valley, and they didn’t particularly care for being criticized, particularly Andreessen, who already was shifting to the right, and got really angry about this.
Musk got annoyed—he didn’t own Twitter (or X now) at the time—but he started to slowly kind of shift to the right. Thiel brought all of these billionaires, these tech guys in to meet Trump right after he got elected. Which, by the way, it’s not conspiratorial, that’s very normal for industry, you want to meet with the person who’s in charge. I don’t think that there’s anything particularly evil about that, or anything to look for that is conspiracy. But these guys had all been criticizing Trump in the lead up to that and then all met with him, didn’t mention any of the things that he was going to do that were offensive, etc.. They worked with him.
2020 with the pandemic, I think that really kind of launched these guys all the way to the right to be outwardly to the right. Their reaction to the pandemic, their reaction to generally where the Democratic Party was at that point shifted them publicly to the right. Then after Trump lost, and now the Black Lives Matter protests were part of this too, they were very angry about a lot of the things that they were saying. So around 2020, I think is when you see the really hard shift.
Krugman: It’s interesting because the thought of Silicon Valley as being libertarian, and it turns out that they’re libertarian until people start criticizing them, what strikes me is that I think this is somewhat different from the robber baron era, if we think of the Gilded Age and all of that. Obviously, the robber barons didn’t like being criticized and owned a lot of newspapers and so on. But I don’t think anybody tried to shut Ida Tarbell down, this is kind of a new development.
Higgins: I mean, they went after Tarbell, as far as I recall—but not as blatantly—not using the levers of power in the same way that they have used these now. I think that you’re right, that there is a big difference between the robber baron Gilded Age time and now. I think that it’s for a few reasons. One of them is that these companies—these people—have made their fortunes in part based on government largesse. The government basically has helped Silicon Valley to develop into the economic powerhouse that it is. It obviously helped the robber barons as well.
I wonder if it’s that they feel like they’re just owed this by the public and by the state and that therefore, they get angry about it if they don’t receive it. I’m not sure, that’s speculation of course, but there’s also this feeling of noblesse oblige. I think that you had more during the Gilded Age with the robber barons, and you just don’t really see that with these guys. They don’t think that they owe anybody anything. I think like you aptly described, as this libertarian twist to their politics. It’s like libertarianism up until the point that something happens that I don’t like. At which point I want the state to step in and to enforce what I want to happen. I think that they do think of things that way, and I think they don’t really appreciate that they live in a society, that’s a lot of what it is. I think they don’t appreciate that they live in a society, and they don’t think that they have any obligation to the rest of society, or the rest of the country. I think that’s a big difference between the two worlds.
Krugman: Which is odd given how much, as you say, there’s a much more direct role of government contracts in Silicon Valley than—the government was a pretty small entity back then—the late 19th century, but it’s a big factor. You have these people who act as if they were completely independent pioneers. “I made it all myself and thank you Pentagon for the latest check.”
Higgins: Exactly.
Krugman: One thing that strikes me is that this is not a question of “why is the latest cohort of tech billionaires so much more conservative than the previous one?” These are the same guys. I think part of it is that these are people who 10-15 years ago were everybody’s folk heroes and have lost that status and are not taking it well.
Higgins: I agree, I think that they are upset. In the book I talked to Margaret O’Meara, and she pointed me toward this section of a Teddy Roosevelt speech where he talks about the man in the arena, in part of the speech he says “it’s not the critic that counts.” What he’s essentially saying is that anyone who is simply criticizing what you’re doing when you are the man in the arena—you’re the person who is doing the thing—that they’re just kind of haters, that’s basically the idea here. She said that these guys really take that to heart, they really believe that they are the ones who are out there, they are at the frontlines of innovation in developing the world and taking things to the next level. Anyone who has a problem with that, for whatever reason, they are just doing nothing except criticizing, and they shouldn’t really be listened to.
She said that if you take that speech as an example of the ideology, it can show you where these guys are, how they think about this stuff. I thought that was really sharp.
Krugman: To some extent, this looks a little bit like a midlife crisis for some guys who struck a big one quite young. Not being young happens to all of us...
Higgins: I think Marc Andreessen was a really instructive case. I think he’s really interesting. There’s a reason that he drives a lot of the background of the book and that is that he co-creates Netscape Navigator in his early 20s right out of school after creating a precursor to it that was then taken by the college, which was part of the deal. But I could understand why that would make you upset. Microsoft sees Netscape Navigator as a threat, and basically uses its monopoly to kill it. So Andreessen goes and basically is behind this charge to break up Microsoft. So you get the government to step in for him. The government does, but at that point it’s too late: Netscape is dead, he goes and he becomes a VC. It takes him a little while to have some success with that, but then he eventually does. While I don’t share his politics and while I’d like to think that I wouldn’t come to the same conclusions that he came to, it is very easy to see how at his age, in his 50s, he would be this conservative guy, having had these experiences from when he was in his 20s, an innovative thinker.
As you said 10 to 15 years ago, these guys were heroes. It’s the same people. It’s not these new tech leaders, It’s the same guys. And if you think that we’ve been dealing with them for 10, 15, 20, 30 years and they’re all in their 50s or 60s, that means that they experienced a lot of success when they were in their 20s and 30s, and they have grown into middle age doing this and having these experiences.
Krugman: I think it was Joyce Carol Oates who just wrote a little thing about how sad it is that Elon Musk appears to have no life. He went completely batshit over that—sorry, technical language here.
Higgins: He just seems to me to be a very insecure person. It would be one thing if that insecurity manifested itself in just making bad, maybe profane jokes, but obviously it’s manifesting itself in ways that I think are a lot worse than that.
Krugman: Then—our parallel track in the book—you follow the careers of several people, but I think the Greenwald may be the centerpiece, Taibbi in second place, and then I don’t know what we call it now, but New Age Journalism—the partially-online world of journalism that emerged maybe 15 or so years ago—and it is interesting that the two guys you profiled in particular were at least celebrities on the left and both deny that they’ve actually turned right, but in practice are doing that. What’s your interpretation?
Higgins: “Did they turn to the Right or did the Left turn away from them?” That’s kind of the question that is asked when people turn to the Right. Quite frankly, that’s usually what they say. I would start with Glenn and I would just say that his politics have always been slightly more civil libertarian than strictly leftist, although certainly in the late 2000s to early 2010s he was about as close to being a Democratic partisan as you could see someone like him being, his writing at Salon and then at the Guardian definitely aligned with a lot of mainstream and close-to-mainstream liberals. He was very friendly with Chris Hayes, very friendly with Rachel Maddow, very friendly with Charlie Pierce. I mentioned the three of them because he’s talked about them in not so nice language since then. But I think it is important to remember that he was this guy, this is the way that he did talk about these guys. He blurbed Maddow’s book. I think he blurbed Hayes’s book as well. Again, I’m just bringing them up because they’re big celebrities in liberal media. But I did a study before I wrote the book, I did a study of the way that he talked about Fox News, before and after they started having him on. And it was, at least on Twitter, it was night and day. He called them “disgraceful”, and “conspiratorial.” Then once he was on there, it was like he was an employee. The other side of that is the way that he talked about MSNBC when he was on there a lot was very laudatory, very complimentary. And then when they stopped having him on, it became very insulting. So I think that has something to do with his political shift. I think as well he was—and in my mind, I think rightfully—disgusted and angry with a lot of the things that Obama did, that were continuations, in his view, of the sins of the Bush administration with the “war on terror”. I think that’s a principled stand that he took. I think that whether you agree with it or not, it wasn’t coming from anything other than expecting a change where maybe there wasn’t one, or not the change that he may have wanted. I think once Trump was elected, he was a pretty consistent critic of the Russia-gate stuff. That kind of snowballed itself into being kind of anti-anti-Trump. Then by the time 2020 comes around with the pandemic again—I’m returning to that again, 2020 being the pivot point—he leaves the intercept with which he had founded for First Look Media, and he goes off on his own on Substack, part of this change is propelled by his appearances on Tucker Carlson, certainly on Fox News—as well as other Fox News shows, but mostly on Tucker Carlson. Since then he has been, for the most part I would say, a conservative pundit.
I think he occupies a space now in conservative punditry, which is an interesting part of—I don’t even know if I would call it a civil war, there are a bunch of different factions in conservative media that are battling—but the one that he’s in is this certainly anti-Israel, anti-the-war-in-Gaza, but also kind of sort of anti-imperialist as well, while having some social beliefs that I think would tilt further to the right than he used to be. Tucker Carlson is kind of like this too, although Glenn is not a Christian nationalist like Tucker is. But there is this kind of lane, right? There’s this one avenue that I think Glenn is in right now. He’s pretty well ensconced in. So he has reinvented himself a few times over the last few years. But the one trajectory I think that has been the same is that he has been a conservative.
Krugman: And Taibbi... I don’t want to say too much because of the lawsuit, I remember post-financial crisis he was one of the most extravagantly critical. “Goldman Sachs is a vampire squid, attaching itself to the nation’s face,” or something like that.
Higgins: Yeah I mean, “the blood funnel,” all this stuff is in the book. It’s not in the lawsuit, so I have no problem talking about this. Taibbi really started his career doing an expat paper in Moscow, came back to the U.S., worked his way through a few different publications and ended up at Rolling Stone, which is where he wrote that famous line.
He did a lot of political reporting. I would say that he was kind of more of a partisan liberal at that time even than Greenwald was. Really just anti-Republican, of course he had critiques to make of Democrats, I think that any pundit or reporter worth their salt is willing to throw punches on either side. But I would say that Taibbi’s attacks on Republicans were more vicious and personal than Greenwald’s were, kind of going with Taibbi’s whole Hunter S. Thompson affect.
What happened to him really is that #MeToo happened. That came out. He also had spoken out against the Russiagate stuff and has had experience with the same liberal mainstream consequences that Glenn did. But Matt wanted to—this is my interpretation of what he did—it seems like he wanted to reset himself with the liberal mainstream. So he wrote this book called I Can’t Breathe about Eric Garner. I think this was supposed to be like his moment to really reset himself. Right as he was about to go on book tour, the #MeToo movement hit, and about a month later all of his writing about women at the Exile—which is the paper in Moscow—came out. And it really just torpedoed his reputation in liberal spaces. He seems to have been very wounded by that. Over time, again we get to 2020, and he goes anti-vax. He goes further and further to the right. He’s not with Rolling Stone anymore, now he’s just on his Substack and eventually this turns out to get him noticed by some allies of Elon Musk who then refer him over for the Twitter Files.
Krugman: He described the pandemic as a big turning point for a bunch of people, both the tech bros and some of the journalists, which I find a little bit puzzling because if you’re writing for a living, remote work—my life was surprisingly undisrupted by the whole thing. I’m not quite sure why it hit people so hard.
Higgins: I share your feeling on it, especially as far as work went—it didn’t really change things too much, it just meant that I didn’t go into the office where I was working at the time, I just wrote from home.
Let’s take them individually, and then as a group. I would say first of all, for Greenwald, he’s always been reflexively contrarian. My interpretation of his actions and the way that he behaves, I think for him it was like, “well, everyone’s talking about Black Lives Matter. Everyone’s talking about how we have to get vaccinated. Everyone’s talking about how we have to shut down. If that’s the general consensus, then there must be something to complain about.” Fair enough. I think that in the beginning, he took the pandemic quite seriously. But he had his things. I think that one big thing was that he got mad that people were protesting for Black Lives Matter because “we were supposed to be in a lockdown” and it was “liberal hypocrisy,” or something like that. That’s kind of standard conservative punditry. But you can kind of see things changing a little bit there. Also there was the election. I put his real shift to 2020, but I think that it was the confluence of a number of factors. I think for him it was less the pandemic exactly, and more just all the stuff that was happening. It just kind of shoved him into this—well, I don’t want to take away his agency—I think that he kind of shoved himself into this corner, that’s where he wanted to go. I have heard through the grapevine that maybe the inciting incident for him leaving The Intercept was him wanting to write about the Hunter Biden laptop. At the time that he wanted to write about it, there was no way to know that the contents were real. I wrote about this before I wrote the book, I saw the email exchanges and the editors were basically saying, “we can’t say this stuff because we don’t really know how this person got this laptop. This might all be true, but we just don’t know. With the election coming, it could be a ratfuck. We want to make sure that we’re doing the right thing here.”
For Taibbi, I don’t really know what it was about the pandemic. Maybe it was that he saw that he could get a new audience by leaning all the way into ivermectin and anti-vax stuff and hydroxychloroquine and all of this stuff. But that’s what he did. I think he saw an angle on the Left, to present himself as someone who was saying the same things Trump was saying, but saying them in a lefty way. I don’t really know what his motivation was. All I know is that if you look at where he ended up, right by the time that Biden wins—not even talking about January 6th here—but by the time Biden wins he’s pretty solidly on the right. He starts, at least, to express some views on trans rights that I think were certainly offensive to some people on the left, myself included; his anti-vax stuff, I thought was just lunacy, quite frankly. It reminded me of this guy, Jimmy Dore. I hope that nobody in your audience really knows who that is. But if they do, he’s a pretty crazy figure, another marginal fringe anti-vax figure. But the point is, that over the course of the year of 2020, Taibbi really ended up in this space where he was not only anti-vax and not only having these kind of right wing, social conservative beliefs, but believing because there was all this backlash to people espousing these views at the time, that that was evidence of this great liberal anti-speech censorship conspiracy. That would carry through to his reporting on the Twitter Files.
Krugman: We’ll get to the Twitter Files in a bit, but now I’ve been trying to think about rereading your book and in political science we talk about the horseshoe theory, which is that the far left and the far right are actually, in some ways, closer to each other than either is to the center. But this isn’t exactly that. It’s more that people whose brand is being provocative and contrarian, that is quite easily switched from Left to Right, that’s how I read it.
Higgins: I think whatever the dominant culture is, you just switch from the left to the right, or you act in opposition to one or the other. The interesting thing is now that because of the shifts that these guys have made, it’s very hard for them to pivot back. It’s very hard for them to switch back to the left. And as you say, this isn’t horseshoe theory because, for instance, during the Bush administration how I felt about the war in Iraq and how a Ron-Paul-person might have felt about the war in Iraq may have been similar, on the surface, we may broadly agree on that, but we didn’t really agree on why that was or really anything else. I think that what these guys are doing is just reflexive contrarianism. But as I said, I think at this point they are kind of locked in. I don’t think that they can move back left.
Krugman: I think in a lot of ways, playing contrarian in the midst of an attempt at authoritarian takeover is probably not going to get you a lot of credit. If we ever get out of this, if democracy ever comes back. At times, writing through all of this financial crisis at the New York Times and also just being who I am in the kind of gonzo Hunter Thompson sort of stuff, I kind of envied guys who were able to do that. But even if I hadn’t had the institutional constraints, that’s not who I am. It was entertaining, but it turns out that it’s very easy. It doesn’t give you a lot of grounding, at a certain point you have to say, “some things are right and some things are wrong,” and that’s not how it worked for these guys.
Higgins: Some of the people who I spoke to for the book, their criticisms of Taibbi were that his analysis was always pretty superficial. I think that goes with what you’re saying, that he may have been having fun with talking about the vampire squid and stuff like that, but what was he really saying? I think that’s debatable, I’m not really sure where I come down on that. I wasn’t a huge Taibbi fan at the time. I was much more of a Greenwald fan. If I was a fan of one of them–which I was—I was a fan of Greenwald. But Taibbi’s stuff didn’t really click with me in the same way. Not that I disliked it. It was just not really my thing. So I get where they’re coming from.
Krugman: So the role of money…at no point in the book do you say these guys were or were straight out bribed to adopt positions, not that that sort of thing doesn’t happen—quite a lot, actually. Much more we’re finding out than I would have imagined. But it’s a lot subtler, which is generally true of the role of money in the political landscape, people who think that it’s all about campaign contributions or whatever, that’s just one of the many ways in which money makes its weight felt. I want to talk in general about monetary incentives that can warp journalistic endeavors.
Higgins: I’ll start with Greenwald, not because I don’t want to talk about Taibbi, I will. But I think the Greenwald thing is very instructive. So Glenn goes to Substack. He doesn’t get a deal to do this, there’s no evidence of that, he just goes there. He has a massive audience, he brings it with him. I think he said that he was making more money than at The Intercept relatively quickly. He aligns himself, in my view, with a lot of the beliefs of the tech billionaires, or at least he’s not challenging them. Then years later, he’s getting invited to go to the Balaji Srinivasan conference in the Netherlands, which he told me was a good excuse for a vacation. He tried to distance himself a little bit from the stuff that Srinivasan believes, and this network state stuff.
I think that he has been seen for speaking fees, he and Taibbi both appeared at the All-in podcast conference. That’s my recollection off the top of my head, but I’m pretty sure they were both there. I’m sure that they didn’t do it for free, right? So there are monetary incentives that exist; “once you’re in, you’re in.” That also means it’s hard to get out. It’s hard to then criticize the people whose network is paying you money, the extra money on top of what you make to do all this different stuff. Maybe they’re just not criticizing aspects of the tech sector that I think that maybe I think they should because they just don’t believe that those aspects should be criticized. Maybe Glenn thought crypto was really great because he really did think crypto was really great, not because Jack Dorsey was promising to give a donation to his dog Charity. At the same time Jack was endorsing crypto. Maybe, but I just find that kind of hard to believe. It is in the same way, as I detail in the book, Taibbi benefiting from Elon Musk, choosing him to interpret these cherry picked, internal documents and calling them in the Twitter Files; to say his audience didn’t increase would be ludicrous. We all saw it increase. That’s what happened. So there are very clear ways that people with more power and influence can approach people who have power and influence and offer them even more and offer them the opportunity to see their role kind of expand in the discourse and monetarily.
Krugman: I see this all the time, even aside from journalism, if you’re an academic economist with some foot in the policy world, there are just a lot of—individually, quite innocent—but a lot more doors are open if you’re right leaning than if you’re left leaning. It’s what always makes people who think that there’s this massive left wing bias in academia seem foolish. Certainly not in my corner of academia. The incentives are all the other way.
Higgins: I mean, it’s the same with history, which is my academic background and my dad’s academic background. If you’re a historian who has a left wing or a liberal background that doesn’t distinguish you from the rest of the field. But if you’re a historian like Niall Ferguson, then there are a lot of opportunities that are open to you.
Krugman: Ferguson, on economics as well, got quite a lot of attention for saying things that were just flatly wrong, you know?
Higgins: Well, having read his books, that would track. (laughs)
Krugman: The gravitational pull of money is out there, but some of it clearly was in this case really targeted. There’s a specific kind of chat group, right?
Higgins: Yeah that’s not in the book, that reporting came out later, it was people like Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks and Jason Kalacanis I believe, then Matt Iglesias, I think was in one of them, maybe Noah Smith, this is more of a center to center-right thing than these maybe more mainstream guys. These powerful figures are certainly speaking to journalists. They are speaking to pundits who kind of align with their politics.
Krugman: In the world of actual officialdom, we talk about the revolving door and it’s definitely the case that without there being outright corruption, people handing over bags of money, which also does happen, the lure of big money is always there.
Let’s talk a little bit about Substack, which is interesting because one of the things that you do emphasize is that Glenn Greenwald for a while, and Taibbi still, are earning money on Substack and Substack is—I don’t know what share of it is Andreessen—but he’s certainly one of the backers. I’m trying to figure out how this works. I appreciate that Substack has got some backing from people who are part of broligarchy, the tech bro thing. You argue that Substack actually has favored the right, which I have to say maybe would be true, but it’s not really visible from where I sit. But maybe there are things I don’t know, deals I don’t know about, and all that.
Higgins: A couple of things here, and I’ll take that last point last, but the first thing I’ll say is that Greenwald and Taibbi were both on Substack. Greenwald now is with the right wing YouTube clone, Rumble. Exclusively, his writing has to go on to their blog as well as part of his deal that he signed with them. Taibbi is still on Substack, which he joined when he was still at Rolling Stone, and the loophole was that he could write a book there. So he could write his book chapter by chapter on Substack while not having any kind of overlap with the conditions of his employment with Rolling Stone. His book Hate Inc. is the book that he wrote on Substack. What I would say about that is that it’s very clear when you read it that he wrote it as a blog, without a lot of editing. Having said that, they did make a lot of money on that. Substack takes a percentage. It is their business model. The reason that I use Substack, I’ve been on there since 2018 or 2019: the user interface is just really good. The user experience is very good. It’s just very easy to use in a way that other platforms simply are not, in my experience. I think that’s one of its strengths that it has, it’s very easy to just get up and running with it. It got an infusion of capital—I believe it was in 2019—funding round led by Andreessen-Horowitz. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s venture capital firm, and after that infusion of capital a number of us who were on there already started to notice that they were promoting a lot of right wing voices. One thing they were doing, I think it was called “Substack Pro,” where they would give you a year of expected revenue to get you to come over to Substack into and to write on their and the deal was the basically they would give you this revenue to come over, but if you made anything more than that, they would just pocket all of it. Then after that year you were on your own. For some people this worked out really well for them: for a year, they got to do whatever they wanted. Then they either cobbled it together from their revenue there, or from freelancing or what have you, or they moved on.
For some people—Yglesias has talked about this a number of times—he took the deal, he went over there and he made Substack so much money; just for the first year, he made hundreds of thousands of dollars. He would have pocketed that money, but that’s the risk. That’s the risk that you have to take. The business is also taking the risk as well to fund you. The thing that we noticed is they seemed to be enticing more right wing voices—not sure who was on a Substack Pro deal or not.
There seemed to be a more right wing tilt to the company at that time, to what was getting promoted to the front page. This was happening after the Andreessen infusion of money, I’m not saying there’s a smoking gun or there’s proof of this, I’m just saying that this is what we observed happening, that there was a lot of right wing movement to Substack, and it seemed that they were promoting it and that this was noticeable to myself and other people who were observing it after Andreessen put money into it.
This Substack is one of the most popular ones, right? You’re top ten?
Krugman: If we look at U.S politics: of the top ten, eight are either kind of center left or kind of never-Trumper former Republicans. Only two, Taibbi at number ten and Barry Weiss up at number one, are right leaning, and I’m number seven which is great. Enough so that if I had been offered Substack Pro—I don’t know if they still do that—but I would have been really sorry if I’d taken it.
Higgins: Heather Cox Richardson, that’s another, she’s gotta be number two or three?
Krugman: She’s #2 or #3.
Higgins: I think the part of that though may as well be a reaction to how politics have changed over the last years, because as I recall, back five years ago Andrew Sullivan was up there and Greenwald and Taibbi and all these right leaning figures especially as Biden was elected in the wake of the pandemic, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. I think the top ten now, as it stands, has been stable for quite a while. But in the time period that I’m talking about is 4 or 5 years ago. As I recall, the top ten tilted more to the right. The stuff that was kind of getting pushed onto the feeds tended to be for the Right.
Krugman: I wonder also, to some extent, if that may have been what people actually wanted, and it’s also possibly a misjudgment on the part of a management that they didn’t understand. Who would have predicted Heather Cox Richardson?
Higgins: She found a niche and she has really exploited it to a crazy degree. It’s amazing what she’s been able to do.
Krugman: 2.7 million—but who’s counting—subscribers, people want that sort of earnestness, they don’t want, it turns out, the fireworks. That’s what I’ve been finding.
Higgins: She consistently puts forward a view of politics and history that is really palatable to a wide audience, and that’s really hard to do.
Krugman: I would say—we’re being self-referential here, but—everybody who’s above me on the list, except for Free Press, earns that position by doing real reporting, by doing really hard work, or let’s put it this way: if they start to play around with it, if they try to do an X (Musk takeover) to Substack, if the tech guys wanted to, it’s all pocket change to them, so if they want to destroy the financial base of it, they can afford to do that, but it would destroy the financial base because that’s not what people are looking for.
Higgins No, they’re not. At this point, my overarching view of what they’ve been able to do with Substack, what they wanted to do to disrupt the media, has already been done. So it’s already been a success. Elon Musk investing in Twitter and turning it into X was done because he wanted to control that information space, explicitly wanted to control that information space. When I look at things like Substack, Colin, and—it’s gone now, but—the podcasting network that I had a show on that David Sacks funded, and Rumble, the YouTube clone that has taken a lot of money from Peter Thiel, these other platforms that have come and gone, they have existed to decentralize the media and power them. I think the “power” part is really important. To take these prolific writers and these prolific personalities in the media and to take them from these institutions where they are, and to bring them out and to just diffuse things. I’m not even saying that that is necessarily a bad thing at all. I’m just saying that they’re not doing it because they want to have more voices out there. They’re not doing it because they want to have good investigative reporting from Substack and The New York Times and The Washington Post and wherever else. They’re doing it because they want to de-power a media structure that they feel has not treated them the way that they want to be treated.
Krugman: The whole media news enterprise is such a financial midget compared with these things, it is kind of almost funny for them to be concerned about it, but it nonetheless matters a lot.
Higgins: That’s a really good way to look at CBS news and what’s happening with CBS news, right? That doesn’t make a lot of money. It can shape opinion, but it doesn’t make a lot of money. If the Ellison’s lose money, CBS news loses like tens of millions of dollars a year as it is, if they lose more money on it, turning it into a propaganda network, they don’t care, that doesn’t matter. It is really funny, they do still really care though, that the media is nice to them, because they do understand the importance of the information landscape.
Krugman: I have to say, it really is astonishing to me, given what my daily mail looks like, that these guys have such thin skins. I mean, my God, they would go berserk with just one day’s haul of my email.
I used to envy the showboating guys a little bit, for their ability. But after your book, I was thinking, “thank God,” being a little bit dull, at least in terms of presentation, has its virtues.
Your new book is really fascinating, and quite a portrait of the world.
Higgins: Thank you very much.
Market Design
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