Sheryl Sandberg, the No 2 executive at Facebook owner Meta who helped turn its business from start-up to digital advertising empire, is stepping down. She has served as chief operating officer at the social media giant for 14 years, joining from Google in 2008, four years before Facebook went public.
“When I took this job in 2008, I hoped I would be in this role for five years. Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life,” Sandberg wrote on her Facebook page on Wednesday. She has led Facebook — now Meta’s — advertising business and was responsible for nurturing it from its infancy into an 80-billion-pound-a-year powerhouse.
As the company’s second most-recognised face after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Ms Sandberg has been a polarising figure amid revelations of how some of her business decisions for Facebook helped propagate misinformation and hate speech. As one of the most prominent female executives in the tech industry, she was also often criticised for not doing enough both for women and for others harmed through Facebook.
But her public-speaking expertise, her seemingly effortless ability to bridge the worlds of tech, business and politics served as a sharp contrast to Mr Zuckerberg, especially in Facebook’s early years. Mr Zuckerberg has since been catching up, trained in part for the several congressional hearings he has been called to testify in to defend Facebook’s practices.
Neither Ms Sandberg nor Mr Zuckerberg gave any indication that Ms Sandberg’s resignation was not her decision. But she has also appeared somewhat sidelined in recent years, with other executives close to Mr Zuckerberg, such as Chris Cox, who returned in 2020 as chief product officer after a year-long break from the company, becoming more prominent.
Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at Insider Intelligence, said Ms Sandberg had “an enormous impact on Facebook, Meta, and the broader business world”. She added that she "helped Facebook build a world-class ad-buying platform and develop ground-breaking ad formats.” However, Ms Williamson also said Facebook had faced “huge scandals” on Ms Sandberg’s watch — including the 2016 US presidential election, the Cambridge Analytica privacy debacle in 2018, and the 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
Now Meta is “facing a slowdown in user growth and ad revenue that is now testing the business foundation that the company was built on,” she said. “The company needs to find a new way forward, and perhaps this was the best time for Sandberg to depart.” Ms Sandberg leaves Meta in the autumn but will continue to serve on the company’s board.
Mr Zuckerberg said in his own Facebook post that Javier Olivan, who oversees key functions on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, will be Meta’s new chief operating officer, but that the job will be different to the one Ms Sandberg held, calling it a "more traditional COO role."
Ms Sandberg, who lost her husband Dave Goldberg, the American management consultant and businessman, in 2015 when he died suddenly while on holiday at a private beach-front villa in Punta Mita, Mexico, said she was “not entirely sure what the future will bring”.
She added: “But I know it will include focusing more on my foundation and philanthropic work, which is more important to me than ever given how critical this moment is for women.”
She is also getting married this summer to Tom Bernthal, co-founder and CEO of a global marketing company. She said that parenting their expanded family of five children would also be a part of her future.
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