Meg Whitman cleans house, but not at eBay
Meg Whitman isn't losing any sleep over eBay's role in prepping Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui for his rampage that left 33 dead. Asked what was her worst moment at eBay, Meg confides to confides to Portfolio: "The site outage in 1999," adding that she had to sleep on a cot "for multiple nights." Whitman goes on to give eBay kudos for being "incredibly vigilant around trust and safety and keeping the .01% [of customers who aren't 'basically good'] in line," a boast made all the more ridiculous by the company's recent defense of its sale of combustion-enhancing fertilizer to troubled teen Ryan Schallenberger. (The gist of eBay's defense: Ammonium nitrate isn't just used to blow up high schools and federal buildings.) Seeking Alpha has a complete transcript of the interview, in which you'll find these nuggets Portfolio's editors skipped:
- Jeffrey Dahmer drove Whitman out of the "murderabilia' business: " I had gotten emails from customers not only about Dahmer's refrigerator but autopsy photos - the whole category of items around murders — so-called 'murderabilia.' And we heard from victim's families. The team talked about it and decided we don't want to go there."
- Bored eBay users emailed Whitman because they were lonely: " I can get anywhere from 50 to thousands of emails a day. And because we are the locus of their economic life and also in some ways their social life, there is lots of commentary on almost anything that we do."
- Whitman may have camped out with the technology team during the 1999 outage, but she all but admits she did so as a media stunt: "There was nothing I could do other than be a cheerleader and a coach to the technology team.... We had CNN parked outside the building wanting an update on the status every 60 minutes.... Every hour I had to go out, looking more tired each time.So it was in some ways just leadership by being there."
- Whitman is now spending her time cleaning out her house. She started with the garage.
