30 Unknown Facts About Meg Whitman You Probably Didn't Know

Meg Whitman, known for her tenure as President and Chief Executive Officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, has held a number of executive positions in several major companies including The Walt Disney, DreamWorks, Ebay, Hasbro and Procter & Gamble. Here are some really interesting things to know about the American business executive:

1.  She was cited as one of the top five most powerful women in the world by the Fortune magazine, as the CEO of eBay since 2004.
2.  She was also hailed as the eighth-best-performing CEO of the past decade by Harvard Business Review, for her tenure as CEO of eBay, as well as Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
3.  Whitman made an appearance in the TV miniseries documentary "Makers: Women Who Make America" in the year 2013.
4.  She, along with her husband, Griffith Harsh IV, founded a charitable foundation by donating to it 300,000 shares of eBay stock worth $9.4 million, on December 21, 2006.
5.  In the year 2011, her foundation donated $2.5 million to Summit Public Schools that operates several charter schools in the San Jose area.
6.  Whitman College, a residential college, at Princeton University, completed in the year 2007, was named after Whitman following her $30 million donation.
7.  She is known to have spent more money, around $178.5 million in total, in comparison to any other political candidate spent on a single election in American history.
8.  Whitman was named as one among the women most likely to become the first female President of the United States, in the year 2008.
9.  Margaret Cushing Whitman was born on August 4, 1956, in Cold Spring Harbor, New York to Hendricks Hallett Whitman and Margaret Cushing.
10.  Her patrilineal great-great-great-grandfather was Elnathan Whitman, who was a member of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly.
11.  Her paternal grandmother was Adelaide Chatfield-Taylor, the daughter of writer Hobart Chatfield-Taylor and the sister of economist Wayne Chatfield-Taylor.
12.  Whitman is also the great-great-granddaughter of U.S. Senator Charles B. Farwell of Illinois, through her father Whitman. She is also the great-granddaughter of Munroe Smith, a historian and jurist and a great-great-granddaughter of General Henry S. Huidekoper, a Union Army lieutenant, through her mother's side.
13.  She graduated from Cold Spring Harbor High School in Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1974, where she claims to be among the top 10 of her class.
14.  She initially aspired to be a doctor and studied math and science at Princeton University, but after spending a summer selling advertisements for a magazine, she changed to economics.
15.  Following her graduation from Princeton University, she earned her M.B.A from Harvard Business School in the year 1979.
16.  She first started her career as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble in the year 1979 in Cincinnati, Ohio.
17.  She joined as a consultant at Bain & Company's San Francisco office, where she rose through the ranks to achieve the position of senior vice president.
18.  In the year 1989, she became the vice president of strategic planning at The Walt Disney Company, before moving to Florists' Transworld Delivery, becoming the president and CEO of the company in the year 1995.
19.  She, as the General Manager of the Hasbro's Playskool Division, oversaw the global management and marketing of two children's brands, Playskool and Mr. Potato Head.
20.  During her tenure as the CEO of eBay, from 1998 to 2008, the company grew from just 30 employees and revenues of $4 million to approximately 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue.
21.  It was under her reign that she organized eBay by splitting it into twenty-three business categories with some 35,000 subcategories, then assigning executives to each, and also brought over some key changes in management team.
22.  She resigned as the CEO of eBay in November 2007, while remaining on the board and serving as an advisor until late 2008.
23.  Whitman was inducted into the United States Business Hall of Fame in the year 2008.
24.  She joined Hewlett-Packard's (HP) board of directors in January 2011, and was named as the CEO on September 22, 2011, a position in which her major decision was to retain the PC business of the firm and recommit to it, as her predecessor announced he was considering discarding.
25.  She, along with Apple's CEO Tim Cook and IBM's Virginia Rometty, was named as the "Most Underachieving CEO" by Bloomberg L.P. in May 2013.
26.  It was announced that she was the first employee and CEO of Jeffrey Katzenberg's new video streaming platform Quibi, in the late 2018.
27.  She was appointed to the board of Goldman Sachs in October 2001, but following controversy that she had received shares in several public offerings managed by Goldman Sachs, had to resign in December 2002.
28.  She was the Commencement speaker for Carnegie Mellon University and was awarded an honorary doctorate degree, in the year 2017.
29.  She endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in August 2016, stating that to vote for Trump "out of party loyalty alone would be to endorse a candidacy that I believe has exploited anger, grievance, xenophobia and racial division."
30.  She married Griffith Harsh IV, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University Medical Center in the year 1980, and has two sons - Griffith Rutherford Harsh V and William Harsh. The family resides in Atherton, California since March 1998.
31.  Meg Whitman Net Worth: $3.5 Billion