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From Vanity Fair:

The Huffington Post was not founded to be a business that generated enormous profits. Before it became the 154th most popular Web site in the world, its goal was chiefly political. Following John Kerry's loss in the 2004 presidential election, Huffington and her co-founders, including the investor Ken Lerer and the digital-media savant Jonah Peretti, conspired to create a liberal version of the conservative online juggernaut, the Drudge Report.

By then, Arianna Huffington did not need the money, anyway. She had grown up in Athens, the daughter of a journalist, and moved to England with her mother at age 16. Although at first she spoke very little English, she quickly learned and fulfilled her ambition of getting into Cambridge University. She served as the head of the Cambridge Union, the famed debating society, and graduated with a master's degree in economics. From there, in 1980, Huffington moved on to New York City, where she "ingratiated herself into society," says a former colleague, and then met and married Michael Huffington, an oil millionaire. They subsequently moved to Santa Barbara, where he ran for Congress as a Republican and won.

They had two children, Christina and Isabella, but divorced in 1997, the year before Michael publicly came out as bisexual. (He had told Arianna back in 1985, not long after they met, he has said.) Huffington soon shifted her political alignment, abandoning the G.O.P., and, in 2003, she briefly ran as an independent in a special gubernatorial recall election in California. Arnold Schwarzenegger soon dominated the race�"the hybrid versus the Hummer," Huffington called it�and she withdrew before Election Day.

In 2005, she launched the Huffington Post. As it became a huge success, Huffington, who had little experience in technology or journalism, saw her own brand grow in tandem. But life on the Internet can be cruel. And in a few short years, the site was experiencing a Digital Age version of a midlife crisis. It was reaching 26 million unique visitors per month, an astonishing number, but in the Internet business, sites either grow or shrink. And to grow, the Huffington Post needed more money. The obvious solution was to find a buyer with deep pockets, and in 2011 she found one: Tim Armstrong, a founder of Google's vaunted advertising business, who had by then had become chief executive officer of AOL.

Huffington had met Armstrong after hearing him talk at a digital-media conference. They soon struck a deal. According to the internal memorandum about the transaction that Armstrong presented to the AOL board, now available on Smoking Gun, Huffington received around $21 million from the $315 million sale, $3.4 million of which was in options that would vest over a 20-month period. Since she had put none of her own money into the Huffington Post at the start, and owned only a 14 percent stake at the time of the sale, this was a sweet payday.

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But Armstrong's deal memorandum also revealed some implicit risks, including the possibility of a class-action compensation claim by the Huffington Post's armada of 18,000 unpaid bloggers. Perhaps the biggest risk, however, was yet to be recognized by Armstrong: the unpredictability of the editor in chief.

Armstrong considered Huffington "a critical element to HuffPost . . . and her name is a key [intellectual property] asset," he wrote at the time. But his memo to the board also, in retrospect, reveals that Huffington had overshot in the performance projections that she presented to AOL. In 2010, the site generated nearly $31 million in revenue but made a profit of less than $1 million. In 2011, Huffington expected to double revenues, to $60 million, and profit was expected to balloon to $10 million�no doubt helping to justify the purchase price, which was still more than 30 times Huffington Post's projected profits. Armstrong seemed convinced by Huffington's prediction that her business would explode in the coming years. She projected the company's revenue and profit would surge to $115 million and $36 million, respectively, in 2012, and increase to $203 million and $73 million, respectively, in 2015.

That did not happen. In fact, the very year Huffington cut the deal with Armstrong, 2011, turned out to be the publication's only substantially profitable year. "Just in case I get hit by a bus today," says one former top editor who left about two years ago, "let me state this for the informal record: in my last year there, we made about $110 million in revenue, give or take, and we weren't profitable."

The Huffington Post's financial challenges owed, in part, to Huffington's lack of experience in managing a business, which resulted in questionable personnel decisions and bad ideas for new ventures, among other problems. Some of her biggest initiatives, such as HuffPost Live, her attempt at real-time Internet broadcasting, flopped. ("It was a disaster," says a former senior executive, who remembers around $12 million being spent on the project. "Nobody was watching it.") Another project, "What's Working," which involved the amplification of positive, sponsor-friendly stories across the newsroom, was widely dismissed.

As for her own role, it seems that Huffington never quite grew comfortable with being essentially a division head at a massive corporation. "I do believe she thinks of herself as a transformational figure," one former editor told me. "She thinks that she is Oprah plus Jesus or something, I don't know. She genuinely in her heart believes that she can change the way journalism is done." Another explains, "the main directive of the Huffington Post, at its core, is not about producing great journalism, but it is about maintaining Arianna Huffington's position in the world." (Huffington declined to be interviewed or to comment for this article. "Having negative things said about you goes with the terrain when you try and bring change and break new ground," she wrote in an e-mail. "I can't and won't waste my time shadow boxing with these kinds of accusations.")

During the early days of the AOL-HuffPost marriage, all seemed well. Soon after the acquisition, according to Huffington Post staffers I spoke with, Armstrong put most of AOL's disparate media properties under Huffington's control, and she became a member of AOL's executive committee. "Everybody at AOL said you could see this weight lifted from Armstrong's shoulders because he's not a media guy," says one former Huffington Post executive.

Armstrong gave Huffington a generous budget, and she went to town with it. She hired successful journalists, such as Tim O'Brien, Tom Zeller, Peter Goodman, and Lisa Belkin from The New York Times. She opened Huffington Post bureaus around the world, including in China, the Middle East, and Paris, for which she hired Anne Sinclair, who was at that time married to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as editorial director. What had been something like 18 separate Huffington Post verticals ballooned to around 60, the former executive recalls. "She just started spending like crazy, without listening to anybody."

Between Huffington's aggressive spending and missed financial targets, serious tensions soon erupted between her and Armstrong, explains the former executive. "She just doesn't listen well to other people and doesn't acknowledge when she's out of her depth," this person continues. "Everybody on the AOL side hated being in meetings with her. She would berate people. She would take people to task, and they all just got sick of it." In response, Armstrong is said to have started rescheduling executive committee meetings without telling her, so they could meet without her.

Less than a year into the corporate marriage, Huffington was already looking around for a new buyer to peel her company away from AOL. The New York Times reported that she was overheard talking to a Goldman Sachs banker in a bar in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, about how much the HuffPost would fetch. According to the former senior HuffPost executive, Armstrong told Huffington he would let the company go if she could find a buyer willing to pay $1 billion for it. Not surprisingly, no buyer could be found at that price for such an unprofitable business. Meanwhile, Huffington raised eyebrows at AOL by jetting off to give paid speeches�at around $40,000 per speech�sometimes to companies her news organization covered. "She didn't give a **** and didn't think there was a conflict there," the former executive explains.

Eventually, the executive says, to force Huffington to bring down costs, Armstrong installed an AOL executive at HuffPost headquarters. He also took away from her the control many of the AOL media properties, such as Patch, TechCrunch, and Moviefone. Finally, AOL came up with its "Popemobile strategy," which was intended to edge Huffington out of day-to-day management of the HuffPost by encouraging her to go on trips; on her way out the door, she could just wave "like the Pope to all the people in the newsroom," says the former executive.

But the relationship between Armstrong and Huffington really hit the skids, according to this executive, over a pair of 2012 incidents involving Lauren Kapp, the company's new senior vice president for global strategy. About a month after her arrival, Armstrong blamed Kapp�and by extension, Huffington�for a negative Wall Street Journal article about Patch, a network of online local-news sites owned by AOL, which said that the high cost of running such sites had prompted at least one important investor to rebel against Armstrong's policy of investing in that kind of content. The last straw for Kapp came during a party that AOL and the Huffington Post hosted in June 2012, in Cannes, at a rented house overlooking the Mediterranean. The story goes that one inebriated male AOL executive was horsing around by the pool and accidentally tackled Kapp, who ended up in the water, fully clothed and fully embarrassed. According to the executive, Huffington encouraged Kapp to sue AOL and helped her obtain a high-powered lawyer, much to Armstrong's consternation. AOL quickly settled with Kapp�supposedly for $750,000�and she left the company in July, three months after she started. (Reached by telephone, Kapp declined to comment but did not deny the basic facts of the incident in Cannes.)

Huffington had a tendency to play favorites, a number of former editors told me. It was a habit that led to management miscues that rankled employees. In May 2014, for instance, Huffington announced that Jimmy Soni, the Huffington Post's managing editor would be moving to New Delhi to run HuffPost India, which was just getting off the ground. "This has been a dream of Jimmy's, as both his parents were born and raised there," Huffington wrote in an e-mail to staffers. "And with India such a huge and important market for us, it's great for HuffPost that Jimmy will be there from the beginning of this effort until the launch."

But Huffington's announcement was somewhat disingenuous. Soni, a former McKinsey consultant, had been hired as Huffington's chief of staff in 2011, after a year as a speechwriter for the mayor of Washington, D.C. Soon thereafter, Huffington named him managing editor, in charge of the site's hundreds of aggregators. He was 26 years old and had no previous journalism experience. "He was completely in over his head," explains the former senior executive. "He was a young kid with so much power. He wasn't a good manager."

In fact, after a rough two-year stint in charge of the newsroom, Soni left the Huffington Post amid allegations that he had aggressively approached a number of young women in the Editorial Fellows program for dates. Two of them reportedly brought a complaint to the editor overseeing them and AOL began an internal investigation. Reached by phone, Soni, with whom I serve on a board at Duke, our mutual alma mater, declined to comment about the allegations. "Honestly, I wasn't a perfect manager," he concedes. "On reflection, I don't know that I was ready to be in that position. Suffice it to say, I learned a lot from the experience, and I think I've grown a great deal since." It was time to move on, he says: he and his wife just had their first child and he is writing his second book.

Last year, Huffington further alienated colleagues over another favorite new project called "What's Working." Her idea was to publish more positive stories about people and companies. "We want to show that the era of �if it bleeds, it leads' is over," she wrote her staff, "and start a positive contagion by relentlessly telling the stories of people and communities doing amazing things, overcoming great odds, and facing real challenges with perseverance, creativity, and grace." She announced the idea, in January, during her annual pilgrimage to Davos.

Back in New York, she called a large group of editors and writers into her office. She told them, "What we're going to do from this point forward is we're going to cover all the news, and by that I mean we're not going to just cover the bad news," as one former editor remembers. "We're going to cover the good news. We're not going to just cover what's not working. We're going to cover what's working, and we're going to dominate this. This is going to change the way people do journalism, change the way journalism works in the world."

Jaws dropped. "Understandably," explains the former editor, "when you tell a roomful of people who think of themselves as journalists something like that, everybody was like, What the ****?, and was rolling their eyes." One senior editor, Emily Peck, did such a poor job of hiding her incredulity, according to the former editor, that Huffington demoted her. (Peck was not demoted, according to another person who was present at the meeting, but did choose to bow out of editorial duties and went back to being a reporter.)

Of course, Huffington was hoping that What's Working would lead to more traffic on the site, and perhaps more advertising dollars. Her theory was that positive stories were more "shareable" on social media than negative ones. Regardless, it didn't work. "We saw page views plummet after we started writing a whole bunch of What's Working stories," recalls the former editor, "because they were terrible stories, typically, that no one wants to read." Not one to easily accept defeat, Huffington then repackaged the idea into What's Working: Profit + Purpose, with sponsorship from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the global accounting firm, to offset some of the costs of the new initiative.

As Huffington and Armstrong's relationship disintegrated, she was increasingly cut out of key business decisions, according to a former top executive. By May 2015, Armstrong was close to selling AOL to Verizon. Huffington, it seems, had not been included in any of the negotiations. When the deal was announced on May 12, she was on a flight to Seattle, to attend the Microsoft C.E.O. Summit. She used the five-hour flight as an opportunity to unplug. "Anything happen while I was offline?" she tweeted once she landed.

The ink was barely dry on the deal before financial reporters at Fortune and Recode were speculating that Huffington would want to see the Huffington Post spun off from Verizon and sold to a new buyer. After all, Verizon was buying AOL for its ability to create video content for an array of mobile devices and for its capacity to place digital advertising�not really for the editorial content found on the likes of the Huffington Post. A decade into its life�a veritable century in the Digital Age�the Huffington Post was being treated not as a high-quality news source but as another Web site for click-bait infotainment.

Adding to the intrigue was the fact that she had not yet signed a new contract, theoretically making it easier for her to join forces with a buyer to pry her business loose from Verizon. Shortly after the AOL deal was announced, Recode executive editor Kara Swisher reported that there had been discussions between Axel Springer, the German publisher, and AOL about buying the Huffington Post for $1 billion. Swisher added that "Arianna Huffington is likely to support any deal in which she and her unit gets more money to grow globally."

But the $1 billion price tag still seemed outlandish. "What does surprise and stun me are the absurdly high valuations for HuffPost being floated around in the press," one former senior editor e-mailed me at the time. "My only guess is that Arianna [was] feeding those numbers to her friends, which is a canny strategy on her part."

The Huffington Post sale talk died down quickly. And then, on June 18, 2015, it was reported that Huffington had signed a new, four-year contract that would leave her in charge of the Huffington Post, but nevertheless placed her well down in Verizon's extensive and well-delineated organizational chart and pecking order. Huffington spun the news positively. "After all my meetings and conversations with Tim and the Verizon leadership," she wrote in a staff memo, "I am convinced that we will have both the editorial independence and the additional resources that will allow HuffPost to lead the global media platform shift to mobile and video."

In reality, however, while Huffington had been pouring resources into expensive ventures that failed to catch on and steering her newsroom uncertainly between serious journalism and mass-produced aggregation, the Huffington Post had missed the great shift from audience development based on search-engine optimization to an equal dependence on social media. The downside to training an armada of young writers to aggregate news stories and capitalize on search traffic is that it is hard to pivot. The HuffPost was being overtaken by other sites that had foreseen the change in strategy, such as BuzzFeed, which was born out of its own skunkworks system, in large part through the tinkering of Jonah Peretti, a HuffPost co-founder. (Ken Lerer, the third HuffPost co-founder, is BuzzFeed's chairman.) Meanwhile, the HuffPost�an omnibus of sorts, with seemingly countless verticals and topic areas�began to look like an outlier in a digital landscape increasingly populated by more specialized sites. Life on the Internet can be cruel, indeed.

There were serious doubts about how long Huffington would last at Verizon. This feeling was reinforced when, five days after Huffington announced that she was staying on, Armstrong held a press conference with his new boss, Marni Walden, Verizon's president of product innovation and new businesses. Walden went out of her way to praise Armstrong. "Over the past six years Tim and his team have done an amazing job at AOL and we're very excited to bring him into the Verizon family," Walden said. "Under Tim's leadership, the company has not only returned to growth but it's also become one of the most forward looking companies in the media technology landscape." Neither Walden nor Armstrong mentioned Arianna Huffington or the Huffington Post. One year later, Huffington would be gone.