IT'S NOT JUST YOU: GOING, GOING, GONE: A HALF-BILLION LOST BY THE LADY IN BLACK

IT'S NOT JUST YOU: GOING, GOING, GONE: A HALF-BILLION LOST BY THE LADY IN BLACK

Meg Whitman joined the fledgling Web auction house eBay in 1998 when it had just 30 employees. The former Hasbro executive built the company into an Internet powerhouse--and made herself a billionaire in the process. But to satisfy Wall Street investors demanding growth, Whitman embarked on a number of acquisitions to transform eBay into a broader e-commerce platform. Some of the mergers, including her purchase of payment service PayPal, were hits, but her deal for the Internet-based phone service Skype has not paid off as planned. Two years after Whitman purchased Skype for $2.6 billion, eBay wrote off more than half the purchase price in 2007.

Meanwhile, eBay's core online-auction business has been under pressure from Amazon.com and free-classifieds phenom craigslist. With eBay's shares down 54% from its 2004 peak, Whitman stepped down as CEO last March.

Since then, Whitman, 52, has turned her attention to politics. She served as co-chairman of John McCain's Presidential campaign and is rumored to be mulling a run for governor of California in 2010. But she won't have as much of a war chest if eBay's stock keeps sliding. Her loss in the past year: $580 million.