Top all-time · #187
Matt Stoller
Personal blog · mattstoller.substack.compoliticseconomicsbusiness
Matt Stoller's personal blog at mattstoller.substack.com covers politics, economics and business. Since 2019, 231 different Hacker News readers have linked it 427 times, most often “Bible Lobbyist: We Can't Print Bibles in America Anymore”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Matt Stoller's Substack for its coverage of antitrust, monopoly power, and corporate consolidation, such as Boeing, Big Tech, Hollywood, and private equity.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Called 'a great post' and 'the best reporting' on Facebook and Boeing, 'insightful and well considered', and a favourite on monopoly topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The history and politics of monopoly power. Click to read BIG by Matt Stoller, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- Bible Lobbyist: We Can't Print Bibles in America Anymore21 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2019-08-20
- Why Wall Street Gets a Bailout and You Don't10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2020-04-10
- The Coming Boeing Bailout?9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2019-07-04
- Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-11-29
- Big Bottle: The Baby Formula Nightmare6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-05-13
- Will Spotify Ruin Podcasting?6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-02-08
- WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-09-25
- How to Get Rich Sabotaging Nuclear Weapons Facilities6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-01-03
- Too Big to Sail: How a Legal Revolution Clogged Our Ports5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-11-13
- Facecrook: Dealing with a Global Menace5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-02-20
What Hacker News says?
Yep, exactly, and furthermore this is a deliberate strategy on the part of China, and a naive strategy on the part of the US. Here’s a good article on this very topic that you might enjoy: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-joe-biden-empowered-c...
Comment linking /p/how-joe-biden-empowered-chinas-censorship
on “Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments”Submitted WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism as a story · 1158 points
HN discussionMatt Stoller has been doing some coverage on just how much control China has built in Western economies. Quite scary. https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-joe-biden-empowered-c...
Comment linking /p/how-joe-biden-empowered-chinas-censorship
on “Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments”Submitted Amazon Prime inflates prices, using the false promise of ‘free shipping’ as a story · 1057 points
HN discussion> And why didn't Facebook get sued too? "The rumor is that a suit against Facebook will soon follow" [1] said Matt Stoller in his latest BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly and finance. It takes a lot of resources to file those suits, so don't expect them to be announced at exactly the same time. [1] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-would-president-biden... PS: Since it contains quite a bit of int…
Comment linking /p/how-would-president-biden-approach
on “U.S. Accuses Google of Illegally Protecting Monopoly”Submitted Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor as a story · 781 points
HN discussionIt's important to note that the only reason that Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system to a disaggregated one is because the US Government filed an antitrust suit that forced the disaggregation [1]. And now that that antitrust pressure is gone, we see Hollywood slowly returning to a vertically integrated system, where studios, distribution networks and theaters are all operating in close conjunction to…
Comment linking /p/the-slow-death-of-hollywood
on “Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B”Submitted Will Spotify Ruin Podcasting? as a story · 491 points
HN discussionMatt Stoller < https://mattstoller.substack.com/about> and Ben Thompson < https://stratechery.com/about/> are two of my favorite bloggers; I find their analyses fascinating!
Comment linking /about>
on “WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism”Submitted Soldiers speak out about being blocked from repairing equipment by contractors as a story · 487 points
HN discussionWe can empower democratic institutions like the FTC to be able to take action in these cases, rather than leaving important decisions in the hands of private corporations. > ...what Parler is doing should be illegal, because it should be responsible on product liability terms for the known outcomes of its product, aka violence. ... But what Parler is doing is not illegal, because Section 230 means it has no obligati…
Comment linking /p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-do-to-reset
on “How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler”Submitted Biden launches action on "Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Ag" – can it be real? as a story · 470 points
HN discussionMaglev trains, and also with McDonnell Douglas/Boeing and airframes. https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-bill-clinton-and-amer...
Comment linking /p/how-bill-clinton-and-american-financiers
on “Arm China Has Gone Rogue”Submitted Google’s lawyer accidentally made a sensitive document public as a story · 430 points
HN discussion> I don’t think anyone here is advocating for a legislative solution to this dispute. Not this dispute, per se, but I do advocate for a legislative solution to this whole situation: break them up. Recently posted to HN: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/mergers-ruin-everything
Comment linking /p/mergers-ruin-everything
on “Spotify deletes 70 Joe Rogan episodes”Submitted Google's Monopoly-Based Foreign Policy as a story · 336 points
HN discussionHere's Matt Stoller's explanation: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/ftc-sues-to-block-nvidia-... I'm guessing "the law" is probably the Sherman Antitrust Act, which is still on the books, though enforcement went out of fashion in the 1980s. Seems to be making a comeback, though.
Comment linking /p/ftc-sues-to-block-nvidia-arm-merger
on “FTC sues to block Nvidia-Arm merger”Submitted The Coming Boeing Bailout? as a story · 330 points
HN discussionFor Standard Oil, splitting it up actually increased shareholder value massively. https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/break-ups-and-stock-price... The same could happen with big tech. The market correction could be upwards, just spread across lots of new stocks.
Comment linking /p/break-ups-and-stock-prices
on “Google’s ‘Project Hug’ paid out huge sums to keep game devs in the Play Store”Submitted The smash and grab of Kroger-Albertsons as a story · 269 points
HN discussion> And the western world has been incredibly naive and uncoordinated when it comes to dealing with China. Some of us were paying attention in the '90s and we're still paying attention. Here are some interesting items to review: 1 - McDonnell Douglas (yep the same gang that ruined Boeing): https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/29/business/mcdonnell-dougla... 2 - "Pentagon Blessing" https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB83272788365…
Comment linking /p/how-bill-clinton-and-american-financiers
on “The China Cultural Clash”Submitted High beef prices and the destruction of independent cattle ranching as a story · 264 points
HN discussionThere's also the Softbank buys of equity at consistently higher and higher valuations that they themselves were creating. Matt Stoller wrote a great post about it: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/wework-and-counterfeit-ca... "Generally speaking, Softbank’s model is to manipulate private capital markets as a way of drowning out competitors with cash. For instance, there were several ‘rounds’ of WeWork investment w…
Comment linking /p/wework-and-counterfeit-capitalism
on “WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO”Submitted A salt monopoly could spike car accidents in the Midwest as a story · 250 points
HN discussionAccord to another article McKinsey "encouraged ICE to give less food and medical care to detainees." https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...
Comment linking /p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinsey-3m-a-year
on “Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)”Submitted The Slow Death of Hollywood as a story · 246 points
HN discussionWhy Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...
Comment linking /p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinsey-3m-a-year
on “Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)”Submitted A Wave of Fear in American Commerce as a story · 201 points
HN discussionThere's a number of comments about how hipmunk declined or didn't have good prices. It reminded me of a recent Matthew Stoller piece ( https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-wave-of-terror-in-ame... ) : "Similarly, I spoke on a panel a few months ago in Congress on airlines, and Adam Goldstein, the former CEO of flight travel booking site Hipmunk, talked as well. I used to love Hipmunk, but it’s terrible now and I d…
Comment linking /p/the-wave-of-terror-in-american-commerce
on “Hipmunk Says Goodbye”Submitted An Economy of Overfed Middlemen as a story · 196 points
HN discussion
