Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, a position he has held since February 2021. In 2022, The Atlantic earned the top honor for magazines, General Excellence, at the National Magazine Awards; earned its second Pulitzer Prize in as many years; and was named Digiday’s Publisher of the Year. That year the magazine also digitized its archive dating back to 1857, grew its subscriber base faster than any other publication in its category, and increased revenue by 35%. Thompson founded and incubated a new social media platform designed to improve the nature of conversations, which will be launched in 2023.

Previously, Thompson was the Editor-in-chief of WIRED. Under his leadership, WIRED launched a successful paywall and was named one of Ad Age’s A-List digital publishers. It won a National Magazine Award for design and photography, a Loeb award, and numerous awards from the Society of Publication Designers. Thompson also wrote many features for the publication, including two cover-story investigations into Facebook that have been cited multiple times in Congress.

Mr. Thompson is also a former contributor to CBS News, where he discussed technology on CBS This Morning and the CBS Evening News. He is also a co-founder of The Atavist, a software company and National Magazine Award-winning digital publication that was acquired by WordPress in 2018. His book, “The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War,” was published in 2009 and hailed as “brilliant” by The Washington Post. The Washington Times said it “may be the most important political biography in recent memory.”

He has also been a senior editor at WIRED, a senior editor at Legal Affairs and an editor at the Washington Monthly. Stories that he has edited and assigned have won many major awards and been made into films—including Ben Affleck’s Argo. Prior to becoming a journalist, Mr. Thompson released three albums of acoustic guitar music, worked at Penguin Computing, and co-wrote a book about comparative economic development in West Africa and Southeast Asia. He is an avid runner, and in 2019 he finished the Chicago Marathon with a time of 2:29. In 2021, he set the American record for men 45+ in the 50k race and is currently the third-ranked masters marathoner in the world among men 45+.

Mr. Thompson has written about politics, technology, and the law for numerous publications, and was for many years a senior fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. One favorite piece was this one on his long friendship with Svetlana Stalin. He also wrote the introduction  to “The Best Magazine Writing of 2017,” published by Columbia University Press. He has appeared multiple times on every major cable and broadcast news network. He has given public speeches on numerous topics including the most important issues facing the tech industry, the future of narrative journalism, the way computers are changing our minds, the role of technology in political revolutions, and the way that Silicon Valley thinks about circular economics. He has testified in front of the Mexican Senate about fake news and moderated, or spoken at, numerous events including those hosted by WIRED, The New Yorker, the World Economic Forum, CES, Google Zeitgeist, Google I/O, Techonomy, The 92nd Street Y, Aspen Ideas, Aspen Ideas Abu Dhabi, West Point, Columbia Journalism School, The New York Public Library, and The Council on Foreign Relations. Thompson currently serves on the board of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, and the Friends of the Stanford Daily. He was a United States Truman Scholar and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with honors from Stanford University where he earned a double major in Earth Systems and Political Science, while also completing a third degree in Economics. At Stanford, he cofounded a bipartisan publication for thought and debate called The Thinker and supported it by selling ads.

Nicholas Thompson is represented by the Lavin Agency and Helen Shabason. To inquire about speaking engagements, please visit Mr. Thompson’s speaker page. Mr. Thompson can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where he was named the fourth most influential person of 2018.