The corner office may come with a multimillion-dollar salary, but Arianna Huffington says it can also come with a cage.
'Success can be a trap,' Huffington told Fortune, explaining that executives who have spent years building a career and a public identity often find it nearly impossible to walk away — even when they are miserable. 'I have CEO friends who've stopped loving their jobs, but they're afraid to leave,' she said.
Huffington draws a sharp line between two kinds of lock-in. 'The financial trap is much easier to see, while the identity trap is less tangible but no less real,' she said. The mortgage, the private school fees, the first-class travel — those are visible. But the deeper anchor, she argues, is that the title has become the person. 'They're so identified with the CEO role, or the anchor of an evening show, or whatever big job comes with a lot of recognition — it's become their identity.'
Huffington speaks from experience. She spent 11 years building Huffington Post into a newsroom of more than 850 journalists and the first digital-native outlet to win a Pulitzer Prize. She appeared on Time's list of most influential people and was a fixture at Davos. In 2016, she left it all to found Thrive Global, a wellness venture. 'There are no guarantees anytime you start a new company,' the 76-year-old said. 'But I was ready to throw myself into health, and if I hadn't done it, I would have kind of betrayed myself.'
She credits her mother with giving her the mental framework to make the leap. 'She brought me up not to be afraid of failing. My mother used to say failure is not the opposite of success, it's a stepping stone to success.'
Huffington is not alone in documenting the hollowness that can follow a big exit. After cofounding Wingstop UK and selling a majority stake for £400 million, Tom Grogan told Fortune the result felt 'surreal' rather than satisfying. 'Money doesn't necessarily fill that void either,' he said. Loom cofounder Vinay Hiremath sold his company to Atlassian for $975 million and later wrote in a blog post titled 'I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life' that the windfall left him with 'infinite freedom' but no direction. Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky has said the company's 2020 IPO was 'one of the saddest periods' of his life.
TIAA CEO Thasunda Duckett offered her own formula for avoiding the trap: 'I rent my title. I own my character,' she told Fortune recently.
CEO Times take: The market has already voted on what drives durable performance — clarity of purpose, not the size of the comp package. What Huffington is describing is a misalignment between incentives and identity that no board can fix with a retention bonus. Free enterprise rewards people who move capital and talent toward their highest use; that principle applies to human capital too. Executives who stay in roles they no longer believe in are not just personally stuck — they are misallocating the most valuable resource their organizations have. The lesson is not anti-success; it is pro-accountability. Own the decision, not just the title.
