Nicholas Thompson

Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, a position he has held since 2021. He was previously the editor-in-chief of WIRED and the editor of NewYorker.com. Thompson is also a cofounder of The Atavist, a multimedia content management system that was sold to WordPress, and Speakeasy.ai, which was sold to Amplica Labs. He is a board member at ProRata.AI and The National Committee on American Foreign Policy, as well as the author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War.

Thompson films a daily video on tech policy for LinkedIn and has roughly two million followers across social media platforms. He writes a monthly newsletter, The Most Interesting Reads, which currently has about 500,000 readers, about the best things he has read recently.

Thompson has long been a competitive runner; in 2021, he set the American record for men 45+ in the 50K race. His second book, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports, was published in October 2025.