Key Facebook force Sheryl Sandberg stepping down
- Meta’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is leaving the company after 14 years
- She’ll be replaced by chief growth officer Javier Olivan, a 15-year veteran at Facebook
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Meta’s second most powerful executive Sheryl Sandberg made the shock announcement on Wednesday she will leave after a 14-year tenure that included helping steer scandal-prone Facebook to advertising dominance.
Sandberg, 52, has been one of the most influential women in Silicon Valley and her departure comes as the social media juggernaut faces an uncertain future and fierce competition.
Her exit from Facebook parent Meta will be effective in the fall, she wrote on the platform, adding she planned to remain on the firm’s board.
A Harvard-educated executive, Sandberg joined Facebook in 2008 when it was still just a start-up, playing a formative role in its development into a multibillion-dollar advertising empire.
“Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life,” Sandberg said. “I am not entirely sure what the future will bring – I have learned no one ever is.”
Her job made her not just a recognisable face in tech but also a household name, particularly thanks to her 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.
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The bestseller encouraged women to “lean in” to their careers in order to reach their full potential and overcome workforce obstacles.
It has drawn applause from admirers for articulating a new modern feminist vision and sharp criticism from detractors who say her lofty position has made her out-of-touch with the gruelling personal cost of combining career and family.
The social network has recently rebranded itself in a pivot toward a belief the internet is headed towards becoming an immersive virtual world, referred to as the metaverse.
The Silicon Valley colossus has seen its image tainted by accusations it has put profit over user privacy and even the good of society.
“Sandberg leaves Meta, and the social media environment that Facebook helped create, in a far worse place than she found it,” said Media Matters for America president Angelo Carusone.
“Hers is a legacy of enabling trolling, harassment, and abuse.”
Meanwhile, the likes of TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter and even Apple now vie with Meta for people’s online attention as the Facebook platform is increasingly seen as a place for older people.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the role Sandberg held at the company will be reshaped, with Javier Olivan becoming Meta’s chief operating officer.
The next COO will be more traditional, different from the close second-in-command status Sandberg holds, Zuckerberg said.
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“She has taught me so much and she has been there for many of the important moments in my life, both personally and professionally,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.
“I’m going to miss running this company with Sheryl.”
Before joining Facebook in late 2007 as head of international growth, Olivan, 44, worked at Japan’s NTT and Siemens.
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When he joined, Facebook was a young company with about 40 million users and now has nearly 3.6 billion users across Facebook and other apps such as Instagram.
While overseeing its international moves, Olivan pushed Facebook’s expansion into countries such as India, Japan, Russia, Indonesia and Brazil, according to an interview he gave in 2010 to VentureBeat.
Meta shares fell more than two per cent on word that Sandberg was leaving, another blow to a stock value that has plummeted on worries that the company’s regular growth was coming to an end.
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Facebook was about four years old when Sandberg came on board as a mature, guiding hand at a tech firm with a motto “move fast and break things.”
“I was only 23 years old and I barely knew anything about running a company,” Zuckerberg said.
“Sheryl architected our ads business, hired great people, forged our management culture, and taught me how to run a company.”
Zuckerberg’s farewell to Sandberg gave Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi a sense that he believes he has outgrown her.
“It feels like that relationship is no longer needed or working,” Milanesi said.
Sandberg, long seen as the “adult” at the youthfully managed firm, has found herself the centre of controversy over her role in pushing back at criticism of the social media giant.
Sandberg drew fire in particular over an embarrassing effort to probe George Soros, the billionaire investor, after he assailed the online network as a “menace to society”.
Facebook has acknowledged that Sandberg asked her staff to conduct research on the Hungarian-born billionaire following his remarks, out of concern that he held a “short” position that would profit from a decline in shares.
Among the tech whizz kids, Sandberg offered a steadier hand as a result of her background working for former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers and the philanthropic arm of Google.
Sandberg in 2015 was devastated by the sudden death of her husband, US tech executive David Goldberg, at an upscale resort in Mexico.
Two years ago she announced her engagement to marketing executive Tom Bernthal.
Additional reporting by Reuters and dpa
