Arianna Huffington: A Female Entrepreneur's Success Story

Jenny Zhao
Nov 20, 2022
3 min read

By Jenny Zhao '25

Hearing the name Arianna Huffington usually brings to mind The Huffington Post, or HuffPost, a liberal American blog and news source. The site—co-founded nearly 20 years ago by Huffington—was awarded the Pulitzer Prize just seven years after its creation.

Huffington (then Stassinopoulos) was born in Athens, Greece as the daughter of a struggling Greek newspaper owner. She was raised alongside her sister Agapi, who is now a successful author and speaker. Stassinopoulos later moved to England to pursue an economics degree at the University of Cambridge. During that time, she served as the first foreign-born and third female president of the Cambridge Union—the University’s famed debate society. In the 1970s, she moved to India and began her career as a writer under the guidance of Bernard Levin (described as ‘the most famous [political] journalist of his day’), and published her first book; The Female Woman, in which she acknowledges the need to expand women’s roles in the workplace and end discrimination. Less than ten years later, she relocated to New York to follow her callings in writing, and it was there that she met her future spouse Michael Huffington.

When her career as a writer was taking off, Huffington also ventured into the political field. She contributed to the National Review, a conservative editorial magazine, and worked on her husband Michael Huffington’s ultimately unsuccessful campaign for a U.S. Senate spot. She also had a brief stint as a writer for the TV show Politically Incorrect, and at one point ran in the 2003 California gubernatorial race. Soon, however, she began shifting left on the political spectrum, and it was perhaps this that her idea to create an alternative news platform stemmed from.

In May of 2005, Huffington experienced her first (and most notable) business success. Alongside business executive Kenneth Lerer and BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, she co-founded The Huffington Post, which was created as a liberal counterpart to the Drudge Report, a conservative news aggregation. The site featured works mainly from unpaid bloggers, but also staff writers, with articles ranging from politics to entertainment to academia. Their focus on news coverage—specifically in the political world—has expanded since the blog’s beginning. In 2011, the company was acquired by AOL for 315 million dollars. That same year, The Huffington Post expanded beyond America, launching editions in Canada, the UK, and later France, Spain, Italy, Japan, and Germany. One year after the transfer of ownership, the U.S. version received its first Pulitzer Prize, a highly regarded national honor given for outstanding achievements in journalism, literature, and music. In 2016, Huffington announced her departure from her role as editor-in-chief and the company to further her other project: Thrive Global, a company that helped other organizations support healthy habits surrounding sleep, stress, nutrition, and finances through science-backed solutions. She especially advocates for the importance of adequate sleep and gives many talks every year surrounding this topic.

Aside from her career as a businesswoman, Huffington is just as successful as a writer. Her works include Gods of Greece, Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America, The Sleep Revolution, and biographies about famous figures in history, such as Picasso.

Huffington has created multiple successful business empires and is a best-selling author. Her numerous accomplishments are a source of inspiration for many, including me. Throughout her journey, she has experienced all the effects of overworking yourself for success and achievements, and thus she offers some valuable advice to aspiring female entrepreneurs: “59% [of working moms] report sleep deprivation … Women have already broken glass ceilings in Congress, space travel, sports, business, and the media—imagine what we can do when we’re all fully awake and thriving.”