7 business leaders who've been completely open about their struggles with alcohol and drugs

Geidt, Uber's fourth employee and current executive, had the honor of ringing the closing New York Stock Exchange bell after the rideshare company went public.

Despite her successful career at Uber, Geidt struggled with drug addiction starting at 19 years old. Business Insider reported that Geidt left college early to go to rehab and did not graduate until she was 25. She's been sober for over a decade.

"I had a drug addiction. I got sober. I'm 10 years sober," she said in 2015. "I was in a really dark place."

In July, Gelman posted a photo of a sobriety chip given to members of Alcoholic Anonymous.

Bronze chips are typically given when a member stays sober for a year. Gelman captioned the photo "three years today."

Beyond her tweets, there hasn't been much written about her alcoholism. But Gelman did make headlines for becoming the first visibly pregnant woman on the cover of a business magazine in September.

Winfrey, a wellness investor and the CEO of the Oprah Winfrey Network, revealed her addiction to crack cocaine while she was an anchorwoman in the 1970s.

Winfrey said she used drugs with a former boyfriend she dated in her 20s.

"I was more addicted to the boyfriend than I was to the drugs," Winfrey told the Today show in 2005. Opening up about her drug addiction was the hardest private secret she shared on her show, Winfrey told Today.

Kudlow serves as President Donald Trump's senior economic advisor and as director of the National Economic Council. Before politics, Kudlow worked as a TV commentator and at several Wall Street investment banks.

In 1994, Kudlow told the New York Times he left his job at Bear Stearns to enter rehab after years of alcohol and drug addiction. The company later fired him.

He's been sober for 23 years.

Madden started his shoe company selling out of his car in 1990. Now the company is worth more than $3 billion in market capital, and has hundreds of stores all over the world.

But in 2002, a federal judge ruled the designer was guilty of fraud and money laundering. Madden's lawyer said his crimes stemmed from drug addiction.

In a 2017 Netflix documentary, Madden said he struggled with drug and alcohol abuse since he dropped out of college.

Madden told the New York Times in 2013 he was sober, and he more recently told the Wall Street Journal he spends most of his time with his three children.

Sam Polk began his career at Credit Suisse as a summer analyst, and later got a job trading at Bank of America. During his early career, Polk struggled with dependency on alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, Ritalin, and ecstasy. He also had a self described "money addiction," which led him to quit his job because his $3.6 million bonus wasn't high enough, according to an op-ed he wrote in The New York Times.

Polk later left Wall Street and wrote a book on the dangers of greed.

In 2015, Polk founded Everytable, a healthy fast-food company. Everytable provides low incomes communities access to healthy food by charging more affluent neighborhoods higher prices. Elon Musk's brother Kimbal Musk backed the company last year.

After he sold his startup Twitch to Amazon for $1 billion in 2014, Kan became CEO of the corporate law firm Atrium.

The young founder, currently in his mid-30s, said alcohol had been "part of his identity" since high school. "Unfortunately, it's also been an unhealthy way to avoid being fully in touch with my emotions and my experience of life," Kan wrote on his blog.

Now, Kan uses exercise and meditation to help him deal with stress.