She may have helped "to build a business" but she also did a lot to destroy its reputation and cost Ebay stockholders $billions.
Her supporters priase her as bringing a business mind to California, but remember what she did to Ebay. Forget the outsourcing of jobs, her supporters will only appluad that. Her arrogant waste of money invested in to Ebay by the many small shareholders and users who helped her build that business should never be forgotten.
She praised her own personal investment experience, that after all gives her the ability to throw over $140 million at a campaign to win her a job paying only $250k. She may claim to be beholden to no-one but no-one would make that investment decision unless they expected something out of it.
It does however prove her fiscal profligacy. Ebay never had a revenue issue, it had a spending issue and that spending issue was Meg Whitman. So what did do when she had control of other peoples money?
Waste it on a vanity project. It sounds something like spending $140 million to get a $250,000 job.
Firstly, one has to admit Paypal was an eminently sensible purchase for Ebay. Linking a secure payment system to the auction site was a wise move. Skype however was not. Whitman used $2.6 billion of Ebay stockholder money to billions for a free of charge peer to peer phone service that was popular because it was free.
Not only did she waste all that money, money that could have been better used on a distribution network, as Amazon now has, her brilliant "Investor" mind failed to purchase the intellectual property that made Skype work. In essence her clever purchasing investment made her investors buy $2.6 billion of skype call credit that they could not use.
So bad was that purchasing decision Ebay had to cough up even more money to Skype AND reduce their shareholding.
http://gigaom.com/...
Meg did not have a revenue problem at Ebay - she had a spending problem.She now wants control of the budget of the State of California.