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Candidate Meg Whitman speaks to Cisco employees at a town hall style event Sept. 29, 2010 in San Jose

As Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO, pursues the California governor’s office with an expenditure of more than $140 million of her own money, she has largely succeeded in presenting herself as a folksy, common-sense businessperson who will bring Silicon Valley smarts to Sacramento. “I’m from Silicon Valley, where we actually get things done,” she said at a campaign appearance in Salinas on October 28. “Our problems are tough, but so am I.”

But that image, now familiar from her ubiquitous television advertising, is very much at odds with the volatile personality that many eBay employees came to know during her decade-long tenure at the company. Interviews with numerous former employees paint a picture of a hot-tempered chief executive given to profanity-filled tirades and imperious behavior. Whitman and her campaign declined to comment.

Whitman has portrayed an episode in which she allegedly shoved an employee, resulting in a six-figure settlement, as an isolated incident resulting from normal business tensions. But, according to a dozen former eBay employees who worked with Whitman, the chief executive’s frequent and sometimes-excessive displays of anger were part of the company’s culture, though no other instances of physical aggression were cited.

Some employees also said they were disturbed by Whitman’s handling of an incident involving an up-and-coming female marketing executive and her boss, one of Whitman’s top lieutenants.

Many of the allegations from former employees involve actions or behavior not entirely atypical for a hard-driving CEO at a large company. Indeed, some of the criticism could be read as applying an unfair double-standard; a foul-mouthed, dictatorial male CEO might not attract much criticism if his company was performing well.

And eBay did perform exceedingly well through much of Whitman’s tenure. As she recounts regularly on the campaign trail, eBay grew from just a few dozen people when she arrived to more than 15,000 when she left — a big success by any measure. She was in the right place at the right time, but Silicon Valley is full of stories of executives who took on seemingly can’t-miss opportunities and didn’t succeed.

Brian Swette, a former Pepsico executive Meg Whitman hired as a marketing guru and her chief operating officer from 1998 until 2002, found Whitman to be “a very hard-driving, committed executive. Very disciplined. Very quantitative. She earns the bags under her eyes.” She worked such brutal hours that “sometimes, you’d say ‘Meg, how about washing your hair?’” It would “get to the point that she didn’t take care of herself.”

But to an extent that’s unusual for such a high-profile political candidate, Whitman remains an enigmatic figure. Her career prior to eBay was a mixed bag of corporate jobs that included an unsuccessful stint as the head of FTD, the flower delivery company. The product of a wealthy New York suburb, she overcame a childhood disability to become a sports star in high school before going on to Princeton and then straight to Harvard Business School.

She married Griffith Harsh IV, now a Stanford neurosurgeon, and betrayed no interest in politics until recently. Her campaign has been a tightly controlled affair, with few real press interviews and a bland pro-business message that does little to expose the candidate’s core values and beliefs.

Some former eBay executives believe that her personality, and the way she conducted herself as CEO, are in fact a poor match for a brutal political job like being the governor of California.

“She's a pretty typical CEO, the kind who says jump and waits to see how high. She also doesn't look for input because she prefers to make snap decisions. She makes clear that she doesn't want meaningful input from other people,” said Reed Maltzman, onetime director of business development and strategy for eBay, who worked closely with Whitman in her early years at the company.

"Being politic is a skill, and quite useful in the realm of politics. Do I think she would be a good governor? Unequivocally no, ” said Maltzman. “People are afraid of her. I’m afraid to talk to you. The reason I am talking to you is that I love California."

“She makes up her mind on as little information as possible to get to the conclusion she wants,” said Brad Handler, eBay’s associate general counsel and director of law and public policy from 1997 until 2001. “She does not move off her position once she has staked it out. She does not tolerate dissent. She had no interest in government while I was there. She operates like one of the boys in an old boys’ network. She gets people who are extremely loyal to her, surrounds herself with that bubble, and that is the only information she wants to hear.”

A number of other employees who agreed to speak on the condition that they not be identified painted a similar picture.

One employee vividly recalls a late-2006 meeting about potential candidates for a job opening at eBay that left her physically afraid of Whitman.

“Are you fucking kidding me with this shit?” the eBay chief executive screamed at the executive recruiters who were on the phone, the employee recalled. Whitman was angry because a candidate was not being brought in for an interview. “Do I have to fucking do everything myself? What is wrong with you people?”

The recruiters tried to placate their powerful client, explaining again that the executive was on the verge of accepting a new post elsewhere, according to the staffer. But Whitman would not be consoled. “I don’t want to hear these fucking excuses. I don’t need this fucking shit.”

And then she left the glass-walled conference room, slamming the door so violently that the eBay employee in the room thought the glass would shatter.

“Who freaks out like that?” asked the staffer. “She is not a small person. She is very physically imposing, intimidating, physically banging her fist. People just don’t do that in corporate America. It’s just not normal. It was very scary. I was afraid.”

“She was very angry, irrational when under stress, very difficult to be around,” said a former eBay technology executive who was present at a meeting to discuss a June 1999 crisis in which the eBay computer system crashed and could not be reliably restored. This executive said that Whitman threw a phone or pager at a marketing representative from Veritas Software who had brought the unwelcome news that a Veritas engineer could not attend the meeting. One other employee present corroborated this employee’s account, and a third employee present corroborated that Whitman was irate and used profanity but was unable to see whether or not she threw something at the marketing representative.

About 20 people, including eBay staff and personnel from Oracle, Veritas and Sun Microsystems, were present. Whitman “just went ballistic,” the technology executive said. “She was in a rage, swearing. Really hard-core swearing. I don’t know how many times she said ‘fuck.’ Over and over and over. She laid into this poor woman. She just went on, wouldn’t let go. Everybody was in shock and astonished at what Meg was doing. You just don’t see this kind of thing in business meetings.”

Rebecca Guerra, eBay’s head of human resources at the time, said she was not at the meeting and could not comment on the specific behavior that was reported. But Guerra noted that Whitman was under considerable strain. The computer system was in such disarray that it was quite possible that the company could have ceased to exist, she said. And Whitman, like others in the company, had been working furiously for many days on the problem, with no real solution in sight.

“She was as close to physical exhaustion as anyone I have ever seen,” said Guerra, who left eBay in 2000. “I don’t think it is ever acceptable to throw something, but I’ve got to believe that when the life of the company is on the line, and an executive is drawn that thin… I would not excuse it, but I would understand it. She was accountable to shareholders and users. She was on the line. And when things are still not working a week later, I understand her anger.”

“She was a strong leader, and decisive,” said another former eBay executive. However, “over time, she got more and more arrogant. ... There was a culture of fear. [Employees were] afraid to tell her what she did not want to hear. She became more explosive over time. People were actually afraid of her.”

An alleged sexual harassment incident also left a bad taste with some employees, who cast it as another situation in which Whitman put perceived business imperatives ahead of all other considerations.

Staffers with knowledge of the incident said that it involved conduct in the elevator of a Shanghai hotel. “There was a complaint about some workplace travel,” said Rhoma Young, a human-resources investigator who was hired to look into the matter. Young could not discuss the specifics of her findings, but said she met with Whitman several times and that Whitman handled the investigation in an appropriate manner.

The female executive filed a complaint against eBay and her boss, which was handled via arbitration in 2004, according to a court document in a related case.

That same year, the female executive left the company and moved to a small community in the Midwest. She said she cannot comment on her experience. A former eBay employee with knowledge of the situation said a substantial settlement was paid to the woman. In late 2004, the male executive received a promotion. 

“He was a very senior executive in a very important role, and she was a much less-senior woman with a lot less power in the company,” said one former executive familiar with the incident. “You know how these things go.”

According to many of the former staffers, Whitman’s stress and the management issues associated with it came to a head around 2006, as the company was struggling with a halved market value, a string of unsuccessful acquisitions and a failing Asia strategy. It was also a time when she was facing pressure at home: her elder son, Griff V, had had repeated encounters with the law, and with school authorities at Princeton, while her younger son, Will, had also had serious troubles with school authorities.

Her sons’ problems had to weigh heavily on the exacting, hard-charging executive, who wrote in her autobiography published earlier this year that “We can decry the intense pace of modern life and the pressures we put on our children. But we do the next generation a profound disservice if we do not help them connect the dots between focus, discipline, and the achievement of their goals.”

Brian Swette, eBay’s former COO, traces Whitman’s late-in-life interest in a political career to three people in her orbit. The first was Steven Westly, an early eBay senior executive who was always open about his political aspirations. Westly served as California’s controller from 2003 to 2007.

Second was Whitman’s public-relations consigliere, Henry Gomez. He is now Whitman’s chief campaign strategist. Third was Whitman’s old friend and boss, Mitt Romney, who asked her to lend a hand in his 2008 presidential bid. When Romney’s campaign fizzled, John McCain was eager to have Whitman sign on to his campaign, and hers was among the names he considered for a running mate.

Meg Whitman has apologized publicly for failing to vote regularly during her adult life. Former colleagues said she showed no interest in politics. Her decision to run for governor struck many as out of character, but ultimately understandable as Whitman cast about for a new perch that would be suitable for one of the most recognizable stars of America’s New Economy.

“She was a good CEO at eBay, but her skill set and strengths don’t necessarily translate to being governor,” Westly, a 2006 Democratic candidate for governor of California, said in an interview. “She is absolutely right that we have a budget deficit and big issues with pension obligations, [but] I have been surprised with the solutions she has come out with. Eliminating the state capital gains tax … it is not the time to give huge tax breaks to the wealthy. Cut 40,000 state workers? She has no authority to do that.”

While Whitman proposes to “just run the state like a business,” Westly said, she shows little understanding of how limited the powers of the governor are. “At a company, you have the legal authority to do that. As governor, you have no legal authority to do that,” he said.

One person who knows Meg Whitman well is her longtime Atherton neighbor Gail Kittler. Whitman’s sons were friends, teammates and classmates with two of Kittler’s sons. The two families have dined and vacationed together for years, and Kittler sees a different side of Meg Whitman than most of the world and speaks fondly of the entire family.

“It think they are very lovely,” she said. “She lives two houses down from me. We still ski and hike together. She has always been very generous with the boys. At the time she had access to the eBay jet, she would take groups of kids skiing,” Kittler said. Whitman has been “always extremely generous with her resources.”

If Whitman is not moving to Sacramento come January, as she has promised to do if elected, Kittler says that her old friend will spend time in Telluride with her pet alpacas, and devote herself to building a new house on a plot of land she already owns in Atherton. Griff Harsh, Whitman’s husband, continues his work at Stanford and leaves at 6:30 a.m. every day, Kittler said.

So the new-house plans would be a project Whitman would tackle largely alone. The current Whitman house “is rather modest, with no dining room,” said Kittler. “These are not huge-house people. They are not showy people at all, but very modest.”

Jennifer Gollan and Nate Schweber also contributed reporting to this article.