Arianna Huffington
Age: 60
Occupation: President and editor in chief of Huffington Post Media Group
Previous TIME 100 appearances: 1
When she started the Huffington Post in 2005, Arianna Huffington was a liberal pundit, author and former candidate for governor of California. By January 2011, she was at the helm of one of the highest-trafficked news sites in the world, which had redefined Web journalism by using unpaid bloggers and aggregating content from other sites. The Huffington Post saw even more success in February, when AOL announced it was paying $315 million to acquire the site. Aside from being very profitable for Huffington ($300 million of the deal was in cash), the move also put her in charge of all of AOL's editorial content, and in many ways, made her the company's public face.