# The Atlantic **The Atlantic** is the 1857 Boston magazine — Emerson, Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe among its founders — that became, in the Trump era, the most institutionally secure adversarial publication in American print. It matters to the vault for two reasons: it is owned by a billionaire who has behaved as a shield rather than a lever, which makes it the counterexample to every captured outlet in the Media folder; and it was the outlet that broke [[Hegseth Signalgate]], the story that produced the vault's [[Pete Hegseth - Signalgate strike timing]] quote and the clearest documentary evidence of how the second administration's national-security principals actually operate. ## Ownership After a century and a half of intermittent losses under a succession of owners, [[Laurene Powell Jobs]]'s [[Emerson Collective]] — named for the magazine's co-founder — bought a majority stake in 2017. The contrast with the vault's other owner cases is the point. Powell Jobs demanded profitability and got it (the magazine has been profitable since 2023 after a 2021 turnaround under CEO Nicholas Thompson), but she did not settle lawsuits, install an ideologically aligned editor, or pull stories; when the administration attacked the magazine over Signalgate she said nothing and changed nothing. As of March 2026 it had nearly 1.5 million paying subscribers, split evenly between digital-only and print-plus-digital — a reader-funded model that leaves it less exposed to advertiser or regulator pressure than a broadcast licensee like [[CBS News]]. ## Signalgate On March 24, 2025 editor-in-chief [[Jeffrey Goldberg]] revealed that he had been added, apparently by mistake, to a Signal group in which the Vice President, the Defense Secretary, the National Security Adviser and others discussed imminent strikes on the Houthis; after the administration denied the chat contained classified material, the magazine published the messages, including [[Pete Hegseth]]'s strike timings. The magazine gained more new subscribers in the first quarter of 2025 than in all of 2024. The episode is filed at [[Hegseth Signalgate]]; what belongs on this page is that it happened at an outlet whose owner had no license to protect and no merger to close. ## Voice Under Goldberg (editor since 2016) the magazine's political identity is anti-Trump institutionalism — never-Trump conservatives like [[Tom Nichols]] and David Frum alongside liberal writers — which is why the vault's [[JD Vance News Log]], [[Nancy Mace]], [[Pamela Karlan]] and [[Zohran Mamdani]] pages cite it as a venue for on-record statements and long-form profiles. It shares this position in the vault with [[ProPublica]], and the [[Substack Timeline]] tracks the writers who left it. ## See Also - [[Emerson Collective]] · [[Laurene Powell Jobs]] · [[Jeffrey Goldberg]] · [[Tom Nichols]] - [[Hegseth Signalgate]] · [[Pete Hegseth - Signalgate strike timing]] - [[CBS News]] · [[Media Capture]] · [[ProPublica]]