Do we like them?

Do we like Arianna Huffington?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Supportive of LGBTQ+ people on the record I found, no harm turned up, but the evidence was thin and the unpaid-writers row leaves a mark.

Arianna Huffington is best known as the face of the Huffington Post. In August 2016 she stepped down as editor-in-chief to run Thrive Global, a health and wellness startup. That pivot from newsroom boss to burnout evangelist is the arc of her whole later career.

The messiest chapter was in 2011, after AOL bought the site, when unpaid contributors took a class action over their free work. The bloggers lost the legal fight in 2012, but the row stuck, because plenty of writers felt a site worth hundreds of millions was built on freebies. Huffington's side was that the writers knew the deal and got exposure.

She also sat on Uber's board from 2016 and left in 2019, saying Thrive Global needed her attention. That is all I could confirm from the coverage I could read, so I'm not going to judge her time there beyond the fact that she joined and then left.

On the harm test, the record I found is clean. The Trevor Project announced it would honour her with its Trevor Hero Award in 2014 for her support of the LGBTQ+ community, and she has talked about women's role in changing how we work. I found nothing from her on trans people specifically, so that is a gap rather than a tick.

Her recent business is AI. She helped launch Thrive AI Health in 2024 with the OpenAI Startup Fund to build a personal health coach app, and a late-2024 look at the product found only a bare-bones demo. That is a commercial bet, not a harm, and the jury is out on whether it delivers.

In a November 2025 talk at Lehigh University she argued AI can help people build better habits but should not replace personal judgment. Nothing in my searches turned up fresh news or a new scandal in recent months, though I couldn't open most of the full articles, so treat this as a skim of the headlines.