The magazine was launched in 1993 by American expatriates
Louis Rossetto with his life partner and business partner
Jane Metcalfe.
Wired was conceived in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, when they were working on
Electric Word, a small, groundbreaking technology magazine that developed a global following because of its focus not just on hardware and software, but the people, companies, and ideas that were part of what they called the language industries.
Whole Earth Review called it "The Least Boring Computer Magazine in the World". This broader focus on the social, economic, and political issues surrounding technology became the core of the
Wired editorial approach. Rossetto and Metcalfe moved back to the United States to start
Wired, finding the European Union not a cohesive enough media market to support a continent-wide publication. was the seed capital which saw Rossetto and Metcalfe through 12 fruitless months of fundraising. They approached established computer and lifestyle publishers, as well as venture capitalists, and met constant rejection. The
Wired business concept was a radical departure. Computer magazines carried no lifestyle advertising, and lifestyle magazines carried no computer advertising. And Wired's target audience of "Digital Visionaries" was unknown.
Wired's fundraising breakthrough came when they showed a prototype to
Nicholas Negroponte, founder and head of the
MIT Media Lab at the February 1992 TED Conference, which
Richard Saul Wurman comped them to attend. Negroponte agreed to become the first investor in
Wired, but even before he could write his check, software entrepreneur
Charlie Jackson deposited the first investor money in the
Wired account a few weeks later. Negroponte was to become a regular columnist for six years (through 1998), wrote the book
Being Digital, and later founded
One Laptop per Child. By September 1992,
Wired had rented loft space in the
SoMa district of San Francisco off South Park and hired its first employees. As Editor and CEO, Rossetto oversaw content and business strategy, and Metcalfe, as President and COO, oversaw advertising, circulation, finance, and company operations.
Kevin Kelly was executive editor, John Plunkett creative director, and
John Battelle managing editor. John Plunkett's wife and partner, Barbara Kuhr (Plunkett+Kuhr) later became the launch creative director of ''Wired's'' website
Hotwired. Dana Lyon then took over ad sales. 's
NeXT acquisition,
Steve Jobs' return as an "advisor" to then-CEO
Gil Amelio, and Apple's
dire straits at the time. It depicts the iconic
Apple logo with a stylized "
crown of thorns". The tagline "Pray" is a nod to the company's
Apple evangelists and "devout" followers.Two years after they left Amsterdam, and nearly five years after they first started work on the business plan, Metcalfe and Rossetto and their initial band of twelve Wired Ones launched
Wired as a quarterly on 6 January 1993 and first distributed it by hand at Macworld Expo in San Francisco and, later that week, at the
Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Circulation and advertising response was so strong that
Wired went bi-monthly with its next issue, and monthly by September with the William Gibson cover story about Singapore called "
Disneyland with the Death Penalty", which was banned there. In January 1994, Advance Publications's Condé Nast made a minority investment in Wired Ventures. And in April that year,
Wired won its first
National Magazine Award for General Excellence for its first year of publication. During Rossetto's five years as editor, it would be nominated for General Excellence every year, win the design award in 1996, and a second General Excellence in 1997.
Wired’s founding executive editor,
Kevin Kelly, had been an editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog, Co-Evolution Quarterly, and the
Whole Earth Review. He brought with him contributing writers from those publications. Six authors of the first
Wired issue (1.1) had written for
Whole Earth Review, most notably
Bruce Sterling (who was on the first cover) and
Stewart Brand. Other contributors to
Whole Earth who appeared in
Wired included
William Gibson, who was also featured on Wired's cover in its first year.
Wired co-founder Rossetto claimed in his launch editorial that "the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon", a bold statement at the time, when there were no smart phones, web browsers, and less than 10 million users connected to the Internet around the world, barely half that in the United States. Bold also describes John Plunkett's graphic design, and its use of fluorescents and metallics. Uniquely for magazines,
Wired was printed on a new, state of the art, high-end, six color press normally used for annual reports. And while Wired was one of the first magazines to list the email addresses of its authors and contributors, the column by Nicholas Negroponte, while written in the style of an email message, surprisingly contained an obviously fake, non-standard email address. That was remedied in the second issue.
Wired first mentioned the World Wide Web in its third issue, Inventing the banner ad, Wired brought
ATT,
Volvo, MCI, Club Med and seven other companies to the web for the first time on websites built by Jonathan Nelson's
Organic Online. Among the launch crew of 12 was
Jonathan Steuer, who led the group,
Justin Hall, a pioneer blogger who ran his own successful site on the side,
Howard Rheingold as executive editor, and
Apache server co-creator
Brian Behlendorf, who was webmaster. The web was so new at the time,
Wired hired forty engineers to write the code for its edit and ad serving software. By the end of 1995, Hotwired ranked sixth among all websites for revenue, ahead of ESPN, CNET, and CNN.
The New York Times commented, "
Wired is more than a successful magazine. Like Rolling Stone in the 60's, it has become the totem of a major cultural movement." Wired's expansion accelerated. By 1996, it had launched a book publishing division (HardWired), licensed a Japanese edition with Dohosha Publishing, created a British edition (
Wired UK) in a joint venture with the Guardian newspaper, and had signed with Gruner and Jahr to do a German edition to be headquartered in Berlin. And it began work on Wired TV in partnership with MSNBC, as well as three new magazine titles: a shelter book called
Neo to be edited by
Wired Editor-At-Large Katrina Heron and designed by Rhonda Rubenstein; a business magazine called
The New Economy; and a concept magazine with New York design star
Tibor Kalman focusing on the countdown to the new millennium. In 1996, reacting to the IPOs of web competitors
Yahoo,
Lycos,
Excite, and
Infoseek, Wired Ventures announced its own
IPO. It selected
Goldman Sachs and
Robertson Stephens as co-leads, with Goldman managing. The June IPO was postponed when the market declined. When it finally went out in October, Goldman was unable to close the round following another market downturn, and
Wired withdrew its IPO.
Wired claimed its valuation was confirmed by savvy private investors who put $12.5 million into the company in May at just under the original offering stock price. It also argued that the offering price set by the bankers was merited for pioneering web media, and its revenue at Hotwired was greater than Yahoo's when it went public at a higher valuation than Wired's.
Wired executives blamed Goldman for mismanaging their IPO and not closing the round which already had investors booked. The IPO failure left Wired Ventures cash-strapped. It turned to its current investor
Tudor Investment Corporation. Tudor brought on
Providence Equity Capital, concluding a private funding at the end of December 1996. Wired then proceeded to cut costs by focusing on its US magazine and web businesses, shutting its UK magazine, its book company, and its TV operation, and terminating work on new magazines. By June,
Wired magazine was profitable. The web company, now rebranded Wired Digital, was growing. Wired execs wanted to try to go public again in 1998, catching what was to be the second run-up in internet stocks which resulted in the 1999
dot-com bubble. In 1996, Wired Digital made up 7 percent of the company's revenues, and in 1997 it pulled in 30 percent. The unit was expected to contribute about 40 percent of revenues in 1998. Providence and Tudor had other plans, and hired Lazard Freres to shop the company. Rossetto and Metcalfe lost control of Wired Ventures in March 1998. The Street.com commented that a "company that started out as one of the more promising bastions of the digital revolution lost control to old-fashioned vulture capitalism". Providence/Tudor quickly cut a deal to sell the magazine to Miller Publishing for $77 million. When Wired Ventures investor Condé Nast heard about the deal through a leak to a Silicon Valley gossip columnist, they peremptorily outbid Miller and bought
Wired magazine for $90 million. The month of the sale,
Wired’s magazine and web businesses became cashflow positive. Condé Nast declined to buy Wired Digital. Four months later, Providence/Tudor sold
Wired Digital to
Lycos. The deal almost did not close. Wired Ventures's founders and early investors threatened lawsuits against Tudor and Providence for breach of fiduciary responsibility, claiming they were engaging in unfair distribution of proceeds from the sale amounting to $50-100 million. Ultimately, the controlling investors relented, and the deal closed in June 1999 for $285 million. Katrina Heron became
Wired’s second editor-in-chief with the March 1998 issue. at the
Wired Rave Awards in 2003
Wired magazine's new owner
Condé Nast kept the editorial offices in San Francisco, but moved the business offices to New York
. Wired survived the dot-com bubble under the business leadership of publisher Drew Schutte who expanded the brands reach by launching The Wired Store and Wired NextFest. In 2001
Wired found new editorial direction under
editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, making the magazine's coverage "more mainstream". The print magazine's average page length, however, declined significantly from 1996 to 2001 and then again from 2001 to 2003. In 2006, Condé Nast repurchased Wired Digital from Lycos, returning the website to the same company that published the magazine, reuniting the brand. In 2009, Condé Nast Italia launched the Italian edition of
Wired and
Wired.it. On April 2, 2009, Condé Nast relaunched the UK edition of
Wired, edited by David Rowan, and launched
Wired.co.uk. In August 2023,
Katie Drummond was announced as the new editor of
Wired. In 2025, during the second presidency of
Donald Trump,
Wired became noted for breaking numerous stories about the Trump administration and
Elon Musk's
Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk criticized the magazine, saying
Wired "went from being about technology to being an unreadable, far-left wing propaganda mouthpiece." In August 2025, Jacob Furedi, the former deputy editor of
UnHerd and editor of the publication
Dispatch, investigated articles on
Business Insider and
Wired written by a supposed freelancer named Margaux Blanchard after receiving an email. After concluding that the articles were AI-generated, he contacted
Press Gazette. Both
Business Insider and
Wired subsequently removed the articles. In April 2026, the magazine announced its Italian print edition will cease. ==Online magazine==