WOMEN IN FOCUS
corruption, both personal and corporate, soon switched targets. She began openly criticising her former Republican allies, particularly George W Bush and Dick Cheney, in her book ‘Pigs at the Trough’, and even ran as an independent candidate against Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor of California in 2003. Her fury reached its zenith in 2004 with Bush’s re-election. Recognising the role the media had played in this outcome, Arianna hosted a meeting with allies that would result in the inception, a year later, of the Huffington Post – a novel combination of news aggregation and collective blogging, with a palpably leftwing slant. To ensure the site’s success with non-political readers, Arianna, who’s not called “the Edmund Hillary of social climbing” without reason, once again reached for the phone. Her first week’s bloggers included Larry David, Gary Hart, John Cusack and Walter Cronkite. However, not every contributor was a celebrity writer, and the free posts submitted by voluntary bloggers would prove her biggest controversy, later withstanding a lawsuit. Arianna appeared relaxed about the prospect, telling the Guardian: “Nobody made these people blog. They blog because it has a value to them. They want the distribution. They want to be heard.” Growing in influence and reach, with its mixture of passionate politics and winktipping celebrity coverage, the Huffington Post’s place in the media firmament was made concrete with its sale to AOL for $315million in 2011. Arianna herself pocketed a cheque for a reported $21million-plus of that impressive pie, and was named ‘Editor-In-Chief’. International editions soon appeared across the world including, most satisfactorily for the former Ms Stasinopoulou, a Greek site in 2014. No wonder she said of her job, “I want to stay forever.” Not so fast. Despite the growth in influence, readership and profit of the site, even becoming the first digital news outlet to receive a Pulitzer Prize in 2012, it seemed, for Arianna, there was just one more idea brewing. There had been criticism from the start of the site that her ever-spinning Rolodex, the stunning list of contacts and exclusive access to just about everyone in the world that had helped get the Post off the ground, was becoming a potential conflict of interest for detached reporting by self-respecting, scoop-seeking reporters. This was exacerbated by Arianna’s taking up a boardroom role at Uber in April 2016, just when the driver-rental app company was the subject of much investigation over “drowsy driving”. There was no doubt that Arianna was in possession of enough money and power to keep most people happy – a reported $50million fortune and a top-hundred ranking in Forbes’ 2016 Most Powerful Women list, to be specific. However, she had been for some while steering the Post in the direction of the ‘Third Metric’, namely a combination of well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving back. It was probably no coincidence that she had spotted the boom in the wellness industry as a whole and, like all good brand-shapers, Arianna knew the value of her own origin story. Back in 2007, she had fallen over through over-work and stress, and fractured her own cheekbone. From then on, we learned, she had dedicated herself to a better work/ life balance - becoming a champion of switching off, installing ‘wellness rooms’ and ’sleep pods’ in Huffington Post newsrooms, and writing about it all in two bestselling books. And sat back and relaxed? Not so much. Instead, in 2016, Arianna, now aged 66, founded a brand new company inspired by these ideas of balance and, above all, sleep. With Thrive Global, she has set about building a platform to offer health apps, wellness programmes, seminars, workshops, scented candles, all based around the idea that meditating, chilling out, doing less, is the best way of guaranteeing that you will become more productive, more resourceful, more like her, in fact. If this sounds slightly paradoxical, at least Arianna gave up the other job to do it, announcing her departure from the Huffington Post editor’s desk in November 2016. “Running both companies would have involved working around the clock, which would be a betrayal of the very principles of Thrive I’ve been writing and speaking about,” she said at the time. Whether this will be her final hurrah remains open to question, particularly as she once described the Huffington Post as, definitively, her “last act”. For now, sleep is Arianna Huffington’s official focus, but as she’s shown in her life so far, a new idea is never far away, and hers is not a mind that rests for long.
36
Arianna with husband Michaell Huffington and their two daughters
Arianna with Jennifer Aniston
Arianna with Daily Show host Trevor Noah
Arianna with Richard Branson on plane © David Prager
Fifth Chukker Magazine | Vol 2 Issue 11