Arianna Huffington

Founder & CEO Thrive Global

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Arianna Huffington is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Thrive Global, a behavior-change technology company she launched in 2016 to address workplace stress and burnout. She founded it directly out of the experience that ended her previous chapter: having co-founded The Huffington Post in 2005, built it into a Pulitzer-winning news organization, and sold it to AOL for $315 million, she collapsed from exhaustion and sleep deprivation, and concluded that the prevailing model of professional success was actively destructive. Thrive Global is the commercial expression of that conclusion. Born in Athens, educated at Cambridge, and the author of fifteen books, she has had at least four distinct public careers — author, political commentator, media proprietor, and wellness entrepreneur.

Career Highlights

• Founded Thrive Global in 2016 and leads it as CEO.
• Co-founded The Huffington Post in May 2005 and served as editor-in-chief until August 2016.
• Sold The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million in February 2011.
• Led the outlet to become the first commercially run US digital media organization to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 2012.
• Elected the first foreign-born and third female president of the Cambridge Union.
• Author of fifteen books, including the international bestsellers “Thrive” and “The Sleep Revolution.”
• Board member of Uber, Onex Corporation, the Berggruen Institute, the Center for Public Integrity, and Global Citizen.

Professional Journey

Born Ariadnē-Anna Stasinopoúlou in Athens in 1950, Huffington moved to the United Kingdom and read economics at Girton College, Cambridge, where she was elected president of the Cambridge Union — the first foreign-born and third female holder of that office. She also studied comparative religion at Visva-Bharati University in India, an interest that recurs across her later writing. Her first book, “The Female Woman,” appeared in 1973, and she spent the following two decades as an author, publishing biographies of Maria Callas and Picasso alongside cultural and political commentary.

She became a prominent political voice in the United States in the 1990s, initially as a conservative commentator, before moving substantially leftward over the following decade. She co-hosted the radio programme “Left, Right & Center” from 1998, led The Detroit Project campaigning for alternative-fuel vehicles, ran as an independent candidate in California’s 2003 gubernatorial recall election, and registered as a Democrat in 2004.

In May 2005 she co-founded The Huffington Post with Andrew Breitbart, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti. The site combined aggregation, a large unpaid contributor network, and original reporting, and it grew into one of the defining publications of the era. AOL acquired it in February 2011 for $315 million, with Huffington continuing as editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, and in 2012 it became the first commercially run US digital media organization to win a Pulitzer Prize.

She left in August 2016 to found Thrive Global. Her argument, developed across “Thrive” (2014) and “The Sleep Revolution” (2016), is that burnout is not the price of achievement but a drag on it, and that sleep in particular has been treated as expendable by a culture that mistakes exhaustion for commitment. Thrive Global applies that thesis commercially, selling behavior-change technology and content to employers seeking to reduce stress and improve performance among their workforces, on the premise that the two goals are aligned rather than opposed. She has extended the work into audio, co-creating the Meditative Story podcast with WaitWhat in 2019.

Alongside Thrive Global she serves on the boards of Uber, which she joined in April 2016, and Onex Corporation, as well as the Berggruen Institute, the Center for Public Integrity, and Global Citizen.

Education

Girton College, University of Cambridge

BA, Economics

Visva-Bharati University, India

Study, Comparative Religion