Meg Whitman Biography
Meg Whitman is an American businesswoman and former political candidate who currently serves as the US ambassador to Kenya. She previously served as the president and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Whitman was a key figure in Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012. She ran as a Republican for governor of California in 2010, but she backed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election and Joe Biden in the 2020 general election.
How old is Meg Whitman? – Age
She is 65 years old as of 4 August 2021. She was born in 1956 in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, United States. Her real name is Margaret Cushing Whitman.
Meg Whitman Family
Whitman is the daughter of Hendricks Hallett Whitman, Jr. and Margaret Cushing (née Goodhue). Elnathan Whitman, her patrilineal great-great-great-grandfather, was a member of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly. Whitman is also a great-great-granddaughter of U.S. Senator Charles B. Farwell of Illinois through her father.
She is a great-granddaughter of historian and jurist Munroe Smith and a great-great-granddaughter of General Henry S. Huidekoper on her mother’s side. Adelaide Chatfield-Taylor, her paternal grandmother, was the daughter of writer Hobart Chatfield-Taylor and his wife, Rose Farwell Chatfield-Taylor, and the sister of economist Wayne Chatfield-Taylor.
Who is Meg Whitman’s Husband? – Marriage
Whitman is married to Griffith Harsh IV, the Chair of Neurosurgery at the University of California, Davis, and a former Stanford University Medical Center employee. They’ve got two sons.
Is Meg Whitman self-made? – Net Worth
Whitman has an estimated net worth of $3.8 billion. Whitman’s self-made score of 6 reflects the fact that she is the only woman on this list who is a “hired or hands-off investor who did not create the business” from which she profits.
With a net worth of $1.3 billion in 2010, she spent the second most of her own money on the race than any other political candidate in American history, spending $144 million of her own fortune and $178.5 million total, including money from donors, a record only surpassed by Michael Bloomberg in the 2020 presidential election. Whitman was defeated in the 2010 California gubernatorial election by Democratic former Governor Jerry Brown, who received 54 percent of the vote to Whitman’s 41 percent.
Where did Meg Whitman go to College? – Education
Whitman attended Cold Spring Harbor High School in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, for three years before graduating in 1974. According to her memoirs, she was in the top ten of her class. She wanted to be a doctor, so she went to Princeton University and majored in math and science. She switched to economics after spending the summer selling advertisements for the magazine Business Today. After completing an 83-page senior thesis titled “The Marketing of American Consumer Products in Western Europe,” she received an A.B. in economics with honors from Princeton University in 1977. In 1979, Whitman earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
How much money does Meg Whitman have?
Her salary is not on record.
Meg Whitman Leadership Style
Whitman understands the importance of good leadership in the success of an organization. As a result, she’s developed her leadership skills over time. As a leader, Meg Whitman primarily uses transformational and charismatic leadership styles. Her transformational leadership can be seen in a number of ways.
To begin with, she uses intellectual stimulation as a tool to encourage her followers to be innovative in their approach to their responsibilities. She frequently asks probing questions of her employees, for example, in an attempt to challenge their status quo. “Meg Whitman does not tell people what to do,” writes Daft (2011). ‘However, she keeps questioning them until the way forward becomes clear’ (p.61). Whitman is a proponent of individualized consideration, which is in line with her transformative leadership style. One of the ways she accomplishes this is by ensuring that open communication is maintained within an organization. She removed all the bureaucracy that limited communication between the executive and lower-level employees when she joined HP.
She accomplished this by establishing a ‘bureaucracy buster’ email that allows employees to communicate directly with the company’s top executives. Her characteristic of individualized consideration has resulted in the development of a strong relationship with lower-level employees, thereby contributing to the development of a strong organizational identity.
Despite her position, most employees see her as a down-to-earth CEO (Duffy, 2013). HP has created a culture in which employees are required to collaborate and work as a team in order to achieve its organizational goals.
Meg Whitman House
Whitman is selling her apartment in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, for $6.5 million, the same amount she paid for it two years ago. According to the listing posted Monday by Josh and Matthew Altman of Douglas Elliman, the residence is located on the 24th floor of the 31-story Sierra Towers and features 2,300 square feet of living space, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a fully equipped kitchen with marble countertops and fine cabinetry.
According to property records and published reports, the Sierra Towers is a luxury condominium building with celebrity residents such as David Geffen, Cher, and Elton John since it opened in 1966. According to the listing, the home is bright and airy, with high-end finishes and views of the city skyline. There’s also a private terrace and two parking spaces.
Meg Whitman Quibi
Whitman was the founder and CEO of Quibi, a smartphone app for short-form media content. Despite its $1.75 billion initial investment, Quibi was considering a sale or acquisition in September 2020, just 5 months after its launch, with a valuation of $500 million, having failed to meet subscriber targets. The failure has been blamed on the concept itself, as well as Meg Whitman’s lack of “experience in the industry of the company she is running,” according to coverage and analysis. Many in the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem predicted the app’s failure, with one critic, Rob Enderle, citing Whitman’s “inability to take responsibility for mistakes, an inability to support subordinates, a focus on shifting blame, and a lack of subject matter expertise” as the most recent of her “repetitive failures.”
Meg Whitman eBay
Whitman joined eBay in March 1998, when the company had 30 employees and $4 million in revenue. Through 2008, the company grew to approximately 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue during her tenure as CEO. Whitman first discovered eBay as a simple black and white webpage with courier font when she first signed up. The site went down for eight hours on her first day.
She thought the site was confusing, so she started by putting together a new executive team. Whitman divided the company into twenty-three business categories in order to organize it. After that, she assigned executives to each of the 35,000 subcategories. PayPal became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay in 2002, shortly after its initial public offering, and was valued at $1.5 billion. Whitman changed her management team several times in 2004.
PayPal was taken over by Jeff Jordan, international operations were taken over by Matt Bannick, and U.S. operations were taken over by Bill Cobb, who is in charge of the colorful U.S. logo, while each international site has its own branding. Whitman hired eBay’s president of eBay Marketplaces, John J. Donahoe, in March 2005, to oversee all aspects of the company’s global ecommerce operations.
During Whitman’s tenure as CEO, eBay completed the $4.1 billion cash and stock purchase of Skype in September 2005. eBay later admitted that it had overpaid, and in 2009, it sold Skype for $2.75 billion to a group of investors led by Silver Lake Partners. Microsoft purchased Skype for US$8.5 billion in 2011, after the first papers for an IPO were filed.
Whitman allegedly shoved her subordinate, communications employee Young Mi Kim, while preparing for an interview with Reuters in June 2007. Whitman stepped down as CEO of eBay in November 2007, but remained on the board of directors until late 2008, serving as an advisor to new CEO John Donahoe. In 2008, she was inducted into the United States Business Hall of Fame.
For her work at eBay, Whitman has received numerous awards and accolades. Fortune magazine has named her among the top five most powerful women on several occasions. She was named the eighth-best-performing CEO of the last decade by Harvard Business Review, and she was named one of the 50 faces that shaped the decade by the Financial Times.