Nick Thompson

Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, a position he has held since 2021. In both 2022 and 2023, The Atlantic earned the top honor for magazines, General Excellence, at the National Magazine Awards. While he has been CEO, the magazine received three consecutive Pulitzer Prizes, was named Digiday’s Publisher of the Year, 2022, and increased both the number of subscribers and revenue to the highest numbers in the publication's history.

Previously, Thompson was editor-in-chief of WIRED where he helped transform the business model and had a front-row seat covering some of the most important technological stories of our time. Thompson wrote many features for the publication, including a cover story on Facebook that became one of the most read pieces in the magazine’s history and has been cited multiple times in Congress. He also wrote a story about a missing hiker who erased his digital identity, which will soon be a documentary available to stream on Max. Thompson is a former contributor to CBS News, where he regularly appeared on CBS This Morning and CBS Sunday Morning. He is a co-founder of The Atavist, a National Magazine Award–winning digital publication and multimedia content management system that was sold to WordPress in 2018.

Thompson previously served as editor of NewYorker.com. Before The New Yorker, Thompson was a senior editor at WIRED, where he assigned and edited the story that was the basis for the Oscar-winning film Argo. In 2009, his book, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, was published to critical acclaim. Thompson has long been a competitive runner; in 2019, he was ranked as one of the top 20 masters marathoners in the world, and in 2021, he set the American record for men 45+ in the 50K race.