SiliconBeat

In the roughly five months before Meg Whitman announced Wednesday she would step down as chief executive of eBay, she made more than $100 million exercising options for the first time since the company went public, bringing her take from eBay stock to more than a half billion dollars.

EBay’s shares fell the next day, dropping $1.76, or 6.1 percent, to $27.18 before closing
Friday at a 52-week low of $26.83.

In addition to the Whitman announcement, eBay also released results Wednesday for its
fourth quarter, which beat Wall Street expectations, but warned of slower-than-expected growth.

Whitman’s recent stock sales were made under a trading plan she set up last February to sell up to 6.4 million shares between June 2007 and February 2008. The plan was formed under SEC rule 10b5-1, which permits insiders to adopt plans for selling or purchasing specific amounts of stocks over a certain time, so long as the individual is not in possession of “material nonpublic information” when the plan is adopted.

Whitman’s announcement Wednesday raises a question: when did she know she was going to quit, and could her decision be considered “”material nonpublic information”?

We asked eBay but received no reply after two days.

During a conference call Wednesday, Whitman told analysts, “I’ve repeatedly said that 10 years was about the right amount of time for any CEO to stay at the helm of a company. Now that I’ve reached that milestone, I’ve decided that it’s time for eBay to have new leadership, a new perspective and a new vision.”

When we asked about the sales back in September, a spokesperson for eBay assured us that Whitman remained committed to the company and that her sales were simply a part of her “personal asset management.”

An option grant for 2.4 million shares given to Whitman when she was hired cost her
$480,000 to exercise before the company went public. She used $60,000 of her own money and borrowed the rest from eBay. Those shares, when sold over the years, brought her $412 million, according to Thomson Financial.

The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that Whitman appears to be investigating a career in politics, citing a source “close to her” who said she had been ‘talking with Republicans around the state” about running for governor of California in 2010, and “had become ‘fascinated’ by politics in her work as a fundraiser for GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts and a former colleague of Whitman at the consulting firm Bain & Co.”

That’s the same firm where she found her eventual successor, John Donahoe.

Like Romney is doing, Whitman could easily finance her own campaign, as she ranked No. 361 on Forbes’ 2007 list of the richest Americans, with an estimated net worth of $1.4 billion.