Greek American author and commentator, Arianna Huffington is best known for co-founding the famous news website The Huffington Post, which she built in the course of a decade. With a career filled with accomplishments, she has been named one of the most powerful women in the world by Forbes and ranked among Time Magazine's 100 most influential people.
Born Arianna Stassinopoulos as the daughter of a Greek newspaper owner in 1950, she moved at age 16 to England. While pursuing an economics degree at the University of Cambridge, she served as the head of the debate society, Cambridge Union, being the first foreign-born student and third woman to do so. After graduation, she lived for a time in London before relocating to the United States in 1980, where she married oil billionaire Michael Huffington, who later became a Republican congressman.
During the 1990s, she went from conservative commentator to later offering a more liberal point of view. And in 2003, she ran as an independent candidate for governor in the California recall election.
Her move to the news media’s sphere came in 2005 when she co-founded The Huffington Post. The website generated most of its content from citizen journalists and bloggers, creating a liberal alternative to conservative news aggregators. In 2011, it was sold to AOL and she was made president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group. Over the years, the initially politically focused news aggregator expanded to cover a wide range of subjects.
Not only has Huffington made her way in politics and media, but she has also authored numerous books on topics ranging from feminism, biographies, spirituality, and politics. But despite her success in these areas, she began to rethink her priorities in terms of her own mental health.
“Two years after launching The Huffington Post I was exhausted, burnt out. The feeling many of us have. I collapsed from exhaustion and on the way down I hit my head on the desk, broke my cheekbone and got four stitches on my right eye. And it started me on this journey of questioning what success is,” she explained.
This incident is the wake-up call that led her to step away in 2016 from her positions and launch Thrive Global, her health and wellness startup. Over the years, she has promoted the importance of a work-life balance, pushing companies to prioritize it in their firm’s culture.