Meg Whitman talks a lot about her business acumen. She helped sculpt eBay after all. But, if you are to really look at her record, there’s a lot to complain about. <\/p>\n
Take eBay itself. Yes, it grew while she was CEO. But her career was hardly without mistakes there. Take the whole Skype affair<\/a>. She purchased Skype for 3.1 billion dollars, and then had to write off 900 million of that less than two years later. Since eMeg left, they’ve sold most of Skype<\/a> for $1.9 billion. Sounds like somebody has been taking business lessons from one Arnold Schwarzenegger’s School of Stupid<\/a>.<\/p>\n But, go back past eBay, and her record is not all that stellar either. She quit as a failure from her CEO gig at FTD<\/a>. <\/p>\n after two disappointing years struggling to turn a profit…. ‘This company is not fixable, at least not by me,’ Whitman told FTD Chairman Richard Perry… (SacBee<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Furthermore, Whitman’s FTD settled an anti-trust case<\/a> that acknowledged that FTD was essentially muscling competitors out of the market. Not only did she violate the law, she did so knowingly, as FTD was already under a consent decree to not engage in precisely the kinds of activities that she repeated.<\/p>\n Oh, and lest you think that was her only shadiness at FTD, she also did a good ol’ fashioned purge of the “stodgy” (read: old) executives. She eventually settled litigation for age discrimination.<\/p>\n The fact is that Whitman can’t even run FTD with respect for the law, why do we think that she can handle the world’s eight largest economy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Meg Whitman talks a lot about her business acumen. She helped sculpt eBay after all. But, if you are to really look at her record, there’s a lot to complain about. <\/p>\n Take eBay itself. Yes, it grew while she was CEO. But her career was hardly without mistakes there. Take the whole Skype affair<\/a>. She purchased Skype for 3.1 billion dollars, and then had to write off 900 million of that less than two years later. Since eMeg left, they’ve sold most of Skype<\/a> for $1.9 billion. Sounds like somebody has been taking business lessons from one Arnold Schwarzenegger’s School of Stupid<\/a>.<\/p>\n But, go back past eBay, and her record is not all that stellar either. She quit as a failure from her CEO gig at FTD<\/a>. <\/p>\n after two disappointing years struggling to turn a profit…. ‘This company is not fixable, at least not by me,’ Whitman told FTD Chairman Richard Perry… (SacBee<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n