Washington Post hires Simonite as tech companies editor

Tom joins us from Wired, where he has led a team of reporters covering Silicon Valley, from the Big Tech giants to groundbreaking startups and everything in between. As a senior editor for business coverage, he helped reporters break news on a broad range of topics, including how OpenAI signed a letter of intent to buy chips from an AI company backed by CEO Sam Altman and how the robotaxis that roam the streets of San Francisco occasionally trap human drivers. Tom also commissioned in-depth stories revealing the surprising afterlife in eastern Ukraine of totaled American Teslas and the grueling working conditions for contractors caught in the collapsing rent-a-scooter bubble, a piece memorably titled “Blood, Guns and Broken Scooters.” Tom also launched and edited Wired’s Fast Forward AI newsletter.

Before becoming an editor, Tom was a senior writer covering artificial intelligence at Wired. As a reporter, he filed impactful stories about a text generator that led a video game community down a disturbing path and the inside story of how the ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru was ejected from Google. Tom also wrote the occasional fun feature, including a piece about the quest for a pill to defeat aging (in dogs). Prior to joining Wired, Tom led coverage of Silicon Valley for MIT Technology Review, a bimonthly magazine that features in-depth reporting on innovation. He is a co-designer of the Pulitzer Center’s AI Spotlight Series, which aims to train 1,000 journalists to cover artificial intelligence with a priority placed on the Global South and other underrepresented communities.