Meg Whitman steps down as HP Enterprise CEO
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Meg Whitman is stepping down as CEO of HP Enterprise early next year, and will be succeeded by current company president Antonio Neri.
Why it matters: This marks the end of Whitman's complicated second act, after having previously served as CEO of eBay during its stratospheric growth. She helped Hewlett-Packard navigate the broader tech industry's move to the cloud, but her early decision to hold onto the PC business was effectively scrapped in 2014 when she decided to split the company in half (she chaired the board of PC/printer-focused HP Inc. until this past summer).
Whitman had been in talks earlier this year to become CEO of Uber, but talks ultimately broke down after word of the discussions got leaked. She also continues to be mentioned as a future political candidate, despite having been handily beaten in the 2010 California gubernatorial election by Jerry Brown.
Meg Whitman's statement, via HPE:
"Now is the right time for Antonio and a new generation of leaders to take the reins of HPE. I have tremendous confidence that they will continue to build a great company that will thrive well into the future."
HPE shares were down around 7% in aftermarket trading.
- Go deeper via The Information:"Whitman, 60, has transformed the company she took over in 2011. She slashed its debt and carved off the consumer PC and printer business into a separate company. HPE itself has been slimmed down through spin-offs and layoffs... Whitman hasn't been able to solve HPE's core problem, that companies are cutting back on purchases of servers and computer storage equipment, as they shift computing business to public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services."
