Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman Quits Boards For California Governor Bid, Time Left: 1Y 9M 27D 8H 20M

Meg Whitman, former head of eBay, yesterday quit the boards of Proctor & Gamble and Dreamworks Animation as well as the site that brought the world that awful sweaty pre-auction-end anxiety. Why? Because it looks like she wants to take Arnie’s throne as King of California come November 2010.

As well as being effectively able to hit “Buy It Now” thanks to her position as the world’s 897th billionaire, her political credentials have been building ever since she stepped down as CEO of eBay in March last year. She backed the handsomely plastic-looking Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign train last year, before neatly hopping aboard McCain’s once he became the Republican candidate; McCain said she could be a future Treasury Secretary during the presidential debates last year: “She knows what it’s like to be out there in the marketplace. She knows how to create jobs”. Sorry John, but getting America to sell up all that crap they’ve got in the loft isn’t exactly the long-term fiscal stimulus that’s needed.

Whitman held the CEO post at eBay for 10 years, starting out when there were just 30 employees. In that time, she achieved a staggering amount – took the number of employees to 15,500; bought Skype, PayPal, Shopping.com, Gumtree and a quarter of Craigslist; moved into China via a deal with Chinese internet provider Tom; got it to where it’s turning over $8.46bn a year. Shame the whole Skype thing didn’t really pan out though.

She’s toothy and cosy-looking with an edge of pure steel, like Cilla Black crossed with Margaret Thatcher, and is married to a brain surgeon called Griffith Rutherford Harsh IV (yikes!). She looked after Mr Potato Head for a while, but she loses nice-points thanks to her support for the ban on gay marriage that got passed in California last year, which pretty much rules out the pink vote come 2010. Another thorn in her side is Thomas Hall, who sneakily bought up domain names like whitman2010.com; Whitman’s team spent loads of money trying to get them back and has thus far failed. I’m sure she’ll still be able to come up with something catchy though. After all, eBay was going to be called Echobay before some mining company stopped them. Go for two syllables at most Meg – WhitGov, GovWhit, something like that.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Sci-tech | January 6, 2009 11:43AM |