Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington was born Ariadnē‑Anna Stassinopoulou in Athens, Greece, on July 15, 1950. She left Greece as a teenager to study economics at Girton College, University of Cambridge, where she became the first foreign‑born president of the Cambridge Union debating society and launched her career as a writer and public intellectual. After moving to the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Huffington established herself as an author and political commentator, publishing numerous books on politics, feminism and culture and serving as a syndicated columnist. She was active across the political spectrum at different periods of her career and ran as an independent candidate in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election. In 2005 she co‑founded The Huffington Post (later HuffPost), a news and opinion website that rapidly grew into a major digital media platform; the site was acquired by AOL in 2011. Huffington served as editor‑in‑chief and continued to influence the site until she announced her departure in 2016 to focus on wellness entrepreneurship. After leaving HuffPost she founded Thrive Global in 2016, a company focused on reducing stress and burnout and improving wellbeing through behavior‑change technology and corporate programs; Thrive has since become her primary business and public platform for advocating sleep, mindfulness and sustainable work‑life practices.