Nicholas Thompson (born 1975) is an American technology journalist, author, and media executive. He has been the chief executive officer of the American magazine The Atlantic since February 2021. Thompson previously worked as editor-in-chief of Wired and The New Yorker’s website. He is the author of two non-fiction books, is a contributor for CBS News, and regularly appears on CBS This Morning and CBSN.

Thompson is the son of W. Scott Thompson and Nina Nitze. His father was a former professor of Southeast Asian studies and a member of both the Ford and Reagan presidential administrations. Thompson grew up in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts and went to high school at Phillips Academy in Andover.

He attended Stanford University where he wrote for the Stanford Daily and founded a student newspaper, The Thinker. In 1996, he was awarded a Harry S. Truman Scholarship. Upon receiving the scholarship, Thompson said that his interest wasin "help[ing] create links between environmentalists and businesspeople." Thompson graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1997 with honors and with degrees in Earth Systems, Political Science, and Economics.

After college, Thompson briefly worked at CBS as an associate producer before being fired on his first day, as someone believed he was too inexperienced. Without other plans, he traveled to Africa, where he was kidnapped in Morocco by drug dealers immediately upon landing. The daylong experience led Thompson to publish his first professional story, a piece in The Washington Post titled "Continental Drift."

When he came back to the U.S., Thompson worked as a freelance journalist and as a street musician in New York City, frequently performing on the 14th Street L train platform at Sixth Avenue. He was then hired at Penguin Computing, a Linux hardware company in San Francisco, but he made the transition back to journalism when he was hired as an editor of the Washington Monthly in 1999. Thompson worked at Washington Monthly for two years, One of his most prominent stores was a piece that exposed fraud in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. Following another stint as a freelance reporter in Africa, Thompson was hired as a senior editor at Legal Affairs.

In 2005, Thompson was about to start law school at NYU when he instead joined Wired as a senior editor. While at Wired, Thompson assigned and edited the feature story "The Great Escape," which was part of the basis for the film Argo. He also edited [Evan Ratliff]]'s piece "Vanish", which was an interactive digital manhunt in which Ratliff tried to disappear with no digital record and challenged readers to track him down, all in an attempt to figure out how difficult it would be to "vanish in the digital age." The winner would walk away with $5000 and a photo in Wired, and Thompson's job was to slowly parcel out information on Ratliff.

Thompson, Ratliff, and Jefferson Rabb co-founded the multimedia magazine and software company Atavist in 2011. In 2018, they sold Atavist to Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.

In 2010, Thompson was hired as a senior editor at The New Yorker. From 2012 to 2017, Thompson served as the editor of the magazine's website. In that time, the number of monthly readers increased seven-fold. He also led the redesign and re-platforming of the site, the launch of The New Yorker Today app, and the introduction of a metered paywall. By the time the metered paywall was introduced months later, new subscription sign-ups were 85 percent higher than they had been the previous January. Thompson also wrote for the magazine, most notably a piece on his long friendship with Joseph Stalin's daughter.