Margaret C. Whitman

WHAT SHE DOES
Meg Whitman transforms companies. In her nine years at the helm of eBay, Whitman has taken it from a 30-person startup to an international behemoth with nearly $6 billion in annual revenue and a stable of Web properties, including Rent.com, Shopping.com, and internet-telephone service Skype. She’s also one of the wealthiest women in business, with a 2006 net worth of about $1.5 billion.

WHERE SHE’S FROM
Whitman grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, an affluent community on Long Island. She whipped through high school in three years and then went to Princeton, intending to become a doctor. Instead, she majored in economics, and following graduation headed to Harvard, where she got her M.B.A. in 1979.

After that, the corporate prodigy made her way through a series of posts at blue-chip companies. She spent two years working for the brand-management gurus at Procter & Gamble and then became a consultant for Bain & Co., rising to the level of vice president during her eight-year stay.

After Bain, Whitman bounced from company to company, leaving a series of triumphs behind her. In 1989 she joined Disney as an executive in the consumer products division; three years later she jumped to Stride Rite, where she launched the successful Munchkin baby-shoe line. By 1995, Whitman had become head of floral-delivery company F.T.D., leading its conversion from a florist-owned association to a privately owned for-profit firm. Then she reorganized Hasbro’s foundering Playskool division, returning it to profitability within a year.

In 1998, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar recruited Whitman to run his small startup, which he wanted to build into a large company. Impressed by eBay’s growing community of users and intrigued by the opportunities of the burgeoning internet, she accepted his invitation.

Whitman has a reputation for being a decisive leader who uses a soft touch: She favors collaboration and is just as likely to be seen rubbing elbows with eBay sellers as with other high-powered executives. She’s also known for being competitive and for meticulously charting everything—from the “noise” on eBay’s message boards to the site’s busiest days of the week.

WHAT SHE’S DONE RIGHT
Whitman expertly guided eBay through the dotcom crash, managing to maintain a high growth rate over the years. Today the company generates 125 times the revenue it did in 1998.

Whitman has also led nearly two dozen acquisitions designed to boost revenue and expand eBay’s presence across the Web—and she’s not afraid to pay top dollar. In 2002, eBay shelled out $1.5 billion in stock for online payment service PayPal, and it paid a whopping $2.6 billion, with an additional earnout of up to $1.5 billion, for Skype in 2005, eating up about half of eBay’s cash reserve.

WHERE SHE’S GOING
Skype has more than doubled its user base since 2005, but Wall Street is still wondering whether the deal will pay off, since eBay has been slow to integrate Skype into its auctions, and the VOIP service has not performed as well as expected. Also, eBay’s overall revenue growth has slowed in the U.S. over the past two years, rattling investors and causing eBay’s stock price to drop. All of this has meant more pressure on Whitman, who is being watched carefully.

Soon after joining eBay, Whitman announced that she’d stick with the position for eight to 10 years, a timeline that would have her moving on sometime in 2007. She has avoided such pronouncements lately and is expected to continue broadening eBay’s platform. At the beginning of 2007, Whitman led a $310 million acquisition of ticket reseller StubHub.com, and she’s pushing full force into China, having signed a deal with Hong Kong-based wireless-internet provider Tom Online to offer auctions to mobile customers.

—Clancy Nolan