I'm curious how executives like Meg Whitman end up constantly getting more leadership opportunities despite screwing things up. What am I missing?

eBay did well when she was CEO.

Merit is not a component of American meritocracy. If you're born into an ancient line of people with ridiculous ordinal suffixes after their names, study at Princeton and Harvard, and marry some other guy who also has a ridiculous name, you are guaranteed a lifelong supply of lucrative opportunities no matter how many times you have to write down an eight billion dollar loss after a botched acquisition.

While there are outliers, it was never a meritocracy, it's just an aristocracy and all these people at the top are cronies, sitting on the board of each others companies, paying themselves and others outrageous compensations, that why they can fail upwards and get promoted even more with each screw up, because they are here to maintain the power of a clique. I don't know anything about the Whitman family but I guess it's a bit, old, rich one with a lot of political ties everywhere.

Calling all that a meritocracy makes no sense. It never was. Now the problem today is some people thinking that replacing an aristocracy with a nomenklatura is going to make things better for people at the bottom...

The very origin of the word meritocracy is to satire the very concept it has taken now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology

Word is that she is being considered by Biden for a govt post.

Maybe she'll take over whatever Linda McMahon does.

She donated $500k so I guess that should be able to buy you a job.

https://newrepublic.com/article/159892/republicans-meg-whitm...

She's a republican.

There's precedent - William Cohen was a Republican Secretary of Defense for Bill Clinton.

Off-topic: That doesn't matter much since she vocally supported Hilary Clinton and also supports Joe Biden.

She spoke at this year's Democratic convention in support of Biden. Not saying that implies the potential for her to end up in his cabinet, but a lot of Republicans have crossed into independent or Democratic territory the last few years (some while retaining Republican party affiliation for now).