11 Highly Successful CEOs and Celebrities Who Practice Meditation

After launching the professional social network LinkedIn in 2009, CEO Jeff Weiner has since grown the company to include over 900 million members. Weiner has acknowledged his daily use of guided meditations on the app Headspace in several LinkedIn articles. In an interview with CNBC in 2018, he noted meditation is an important part of his morning routine, along with exercising and getting his kids ready for school. Weiner told The Wall Street Journal that pausing to reflect on situations helps him to strategize and work proactively towards long-term goals. "Part of the key to time management is carving out time to think, as opposed to constantly reacting," he said.

The executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, Bill Ford relied on meditation to get him through several years of bankruptcy. “The practice of mindfulness kept me going during the darkest days,” he said in an article published in Harvard Business Review. Ford also incorporates mindfulness meditation sessions and yoga classes into his company’s work culture so his employees can remain calm, alert, and productive, he said in an article published in the Detroit Free Press.

Marc Benioff is the tech entrepreneur responsible for the software company SalesForce, which is worth billions, according to Forbes. Benioff has had an inclination to develop his spiritual practice after spending time in Hawaii and India with gurus, and returning with a vision of his future company. Now, Benioff has meditation rooms all throughout the various SalesForce offices, according to an interview published in The New York Times.

“I’m trying to listen deeply, and the beginner’s mind is informing me to step back, so that I can create what wants to be, not what was,” Benioff told The New York Times. “I know that the future does not equal the past. I know that I have to be here in the moment.”

Benioff tweets regularly about the benefits of meditation, encouraging others to start with small meditative habits.

Arianna Huffington, cofounder of Huffington Post and founder and CEO of Thrive Global, incorporates meditation into her morning routine every day. “Once I’m awake, I take a minute to breathe deeply, be grateful, and set my intention for the day,” Huffington told High Existence in 2020. “Then I do 20 to 30 minutes of meditation and 30 minutes on my stationary bike, on days when I’m home. I also practice yoga most mornings.”

Huffington relies on a regular routine of self-care that includes daily meditation to help her avoid burnout. When asked by High Existence what she wished she had known growing up, Huffington said, “I wish I had avoided falling victim to the collective delusion that burning out is the necessary price for accomplishment and success,” and “I wish I’d appreciated just how powerful it can be to introduce just five minutes of meditation to your day.” You should not compromise balance and self-care for high performance; renewal is part of the process, Huffington said.

Oprah Winfrey has made it her mission to spread messages of health, wellness, and mind-body balance to all with her talk shows, O: The Oprah Magazine, and her television channel, Oprah Winfrey Network. Oprah has curated meditation and wellness content for her readers, teamed up with spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra for meditation podcasts, retreats, and discussions, and credited meditation with changing her life for the better.

In an article published on Oprah.com, Oprah explained that “Meditation is about getting still enough to know the difference between the voice and you. It's a heightened state of being that lets whatever you're doing be your best life, from moment to astonishing moment.”

Singer Katy Perry has released more than nine No 1. songs in the last decade, positioning herself as one of the top pop stars in the world. But living on the road can be stressful, so Perry learned how to practice Transcendental Meditation.

In a 2022 interview with The Cut, Perry said the practice profoundly changed her life. “I can be too head-in-the-clouds, thinking too much about the future, and it helps me be more present,” she told the outlet. “I’ve dealt with depression and anxiety in my life, and TM is a huge tool.”

Lady Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, has been very open throughout her career about her mental health struggles. The singer and actress suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from a history of sexual assault and also lives with chronic pain from fibromyalgia.

In an interview with Oprah Winfrey during Winfrey’s 2020 wellness tour, Germanotta spoke about her experience with transcendental meditation practice, saying, “sometimes I can be in a ton of pain, and meditate and it goes away. It’s amazing.”

She also shares the ways meditation benefits her with her followers on social media.

“Meditation really improves my mental health and reminds me it's important to stay calm so I can feel safe in my body,” the singer wrote on Instagram. “We are all one body, and the calmer we are, and the more we find inner peace, the more the world will too.”

Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney began his journey with Transcendental Meditation over 50 years ago after attending a lecture with TM's founder himself, Maharishi Yogi. “It was very interesting. It was very calming and it seemed like something that was worth trying,” McCartney told David Lynch in an interview published on the TM Blog.

McCartney was in search of something to provide him with stability during the '60s, and he's maintained the practice ever since. “I think it’s always very good to get a sort of still moment in your day. Whenever I have a chance in a busy schedule, I’ll do it, if I’m not rushing out the door with some crazy stuff to do,” McCartney said in an interview published at TMHome.com. “In moments of madness, meditation has helped me find moments of serenity — and I would like to think that it would help provide young people a quiet haven in a not-so-quiet world."

British comedian Russell Brand has been practicing various forms of meditation, including transcendental meditation, for years and has been a very outspoken advocate of the practice.

In his book Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions, Brand writes: “I have always lived in my mind. We all live in our minds and we have allowed them to become poorly tended. Meditation is a way of cultivating the environment in which I spend all my time.”

Brand offers brief, 10-minute guided meditations on the podcast Stay Awake With Russell Brand and on his social media channels.

Like many people, rapper 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, admits he struggles with meditation — but that doesn’t stop him from practicing. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he says he learned his meditation mantra from Deepak Chopra.

“I try to meditate, but I’m still not good at it,” Jackson told the newspaper. “I don’t know if it’s that my thoughts are racing so fast that I get lost in thought momentarily. But then I have to go back to my mantra again. Deepak said this is normal.”

In a 2022 interview on The Kelly Clarkson Show, Jackson admitted to similar struggles with his mind drifting while meditating but said he utilizes the practice to help him sleep.

Hugh Jackman may be known for his larger-than-life superhero roles in blockbuster movies, but in real life, he likes to keep things calmer. The actor credits transcendental meditation with changing his life.

“I was always very curious and very much a searcher, but soon after I started meditating, I felt I gained a true understanding of myself and was no longer just being reactive to events that came my way,” he said in an interview with psychiatrist and scientist Norman E. Rosenthal, MD, published on Oprah.com. “I felt a sense of calm, a sense of purpose, of finer energy in things I did.”

Jackman went on to say that with meditation, his anxiety levels have “dropped considerably.” “The mind can make us worry about things beyond their measure,” he said. “And the great thing about meditation is that twice a day, the monkey mind just calms down.”