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.
