Meg Whitman
Margaret Cushing ‘Meg’ Whitman is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Hewlett-Packard. She was born 4th August 1956.
Meg attended Cold Spring Harbor High School in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, graduating after three years in 1974. In her memoirs, she says she was in the top 10 of her class. She wanted to be a doctor, so she studied math and science at Princeton University. However, after spending a summer selling advertisements for a magazine, she changed over to the study of economics, earning a B.A. with honors in 1977. Whitman then obtained an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1979.
Meg served as an executive in The Walt Disney Company where she was vice president of strategic planning throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, she also served as an executive for DreamWorks and Hasbro. Meg also served as President and Chief Executive Office of eBay from 1998 – 2008.
In 2008, she was cited by The New York Times as among the women most likely to become the first female President of the United States. In February 2009, Whitman announced her candidacy for Governor of California, becoming the third woman in a 20-year period to run for the office. She won the Republican primary in June 2010. The fourth wealthiest woman in the state of California with a net worth of $1.3 billion in 2010, she spent more of her own money on the race than any other political candidate spent on a single election in American history, spending $144 million total of her own fortune and $178.5 million including donors. Meg lost to Jerry Brown in the November 2 election.
