Meg Whitman Nominated as Ambassador to Kenya

By John Eggerton
last updated

Is former Big Tech and Disney exec

Meg Whitman speaks about the short-lived short-form video streaming service for mobile Quibi during a keynote address Jan. 8, 2020 at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
(Image credit: Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images)

Veteran media and tech exec and Big Tech billionaire Meg Whitman is being been nominated for a top diplomatic post.

President Biden Wednesday (Dec. 8) announced his intention to nominate Whitman as ambassador to the Republic of Kenya, a nomination which will be submitted to the Senate for its approval.

Whitman is the former CEO of eBay, Hewlett-Packard and more recently Quibi, the shuttered short-form mobile subscription video app. She was also a strategic planning executive for Disney back in the 1980s.

Whitman had been a Republican fund-raiser when the rise of Donald Trump pushed her to support Democrat Hillary Clinton for president.

She then streamed her support for then-presidential candidate Biden at the Democratic National Convention. ■

John Eggerton
John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.