Sheryl Sandberg to step down from Facebook parent Meta after 14 years

Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down as the chief operating officer of Facebook’s parent company Meta after 14 years, a major shake-up in which chief executive Mark Zuckerberg will lose one of his closest lieutenants.

Sandberg, one of the company’s most high-profile executives, will leave the business “in the fall” after a transition period, while remaining on Meta’s board, she said.

In a post on her Facebook page on Wednesday, Sandberg did not outline her reasons for quitting the company, which she helped grow from a start-up with no revenue into a digital advertising behemoth. She said she was “not entirely sure what the future will bring” but that she wished to focus more on her philanthropic endeavours.

Javier Olivan, another longtime employee who is the company’s chief growth officer, will take on the operating officer position.

Zuckerberg called the move the “end of an era”, adding in his own long Facebook post that Sandberg, 52, had “architected our ads business, hired great people, forged our management culture and taught me how to run a company”.

The unexpected departure of Sandberg, a polarising figure whose tenure has been littered with controversies, comes as a difficult time for Facebook. The company has been battling multiple scandals, including recent whistleblower accusations that it routinely places “profit over safety”, as well as a slowdown in growth as competition rises.

Shares in the company, which fell almost 3 per cent after Sandberg’s departure was announced, have fallen nearly 45 per cent in the year to date.

Sandberg, a Harvard graduate, joined Facebook in 2008. Before that she worked for then US Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers under then-president Bill Clinton and later grew Google’s advertising business as its vice-president of global online sales and operations.

Cast as the “adult in the room” when joining Zuckerberg’s team of 20-somethings at the time, Sandberg is credited with driving the monetisation of the business, which floated publicly in 2012 and generated $117bn in revenue in 2021.

During her tenure, she positioned herself as an advocate for women in the workplace, writing the modern feminist call-to-arms Lean In. She also presented herself as a champion for small businesses using Facebook to grow.

But she has also been caught in the numerous scandals over privacy and content moderation, among others, that have rocked the company in recent years.

Because of her role in building Facebook’s ads empire, critics have held her partly responsible for the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, as well as the Russian disinformation campaigns uncovered on the platform after the 2016 US election and the broader proliferation of hate speech and misinformation.

As a public figure who once regularly met with lawmakers and regulators, she was often quick to defend the company — with mixed results.

Last year, she caused a backlash for minimising the notion that Facebook played a role in the events leading to the January 6 storming of the US Capitol, arguing that it was “largely” organised on other platforms.

Zuckerberg said Olivan will take on a “more traditional COO role” in which he will be “focused internally and operationally, building on his strong record of making our execution more efficient and rigorous”.

He also announced several other promotions as part of a wider reshuffle in the wake of Sandberg’s departure. “I think Meta has reached the point where it makes sense for our product and business groups to be more closely integrated, rather than having all the business and operations functions organised separately from our products,” Zuckerberg said.

A series of executives have left Meta recently, including David Marcus, head of its financial arm, and David Fischer, who was chief revenue officer.

The upheaval comes as Zuckerberg has shifted the company’s focus to his vision for the metaverse, an online shared virtual space filled with digital avatars, as the pace of its user growth and ads business has slowed.

Insiders say Sandberg, a staunch Democrat who often acted as Facebook’s representative in dealing with the political party, has long harboured political ambitions.

However, politics also likely contributed to recent tensions between Sandberg and Zuckerberg over content moderation issues, according to a former executive, with Sandberg favouring tighter moderation and Zuckerberg advocating that the platform should not be the “arbiter of truth”.

Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg have stepped away from the limelight recently, with former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg taking on an expanded role as Meta’s policy chief.

In an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday, Sandberg said it was “pretty unlikely” that she would take another job in business or enter politics. But, she added: “I learned a long time ago — never make any predictions about the future.”

She said she made the decision to leave the company last weekend and informed Zuckerberg. In her Facebook post, Sandberg also said she planned to get married this summer. Her late husband, Dave Goldberg, the former chief executive of SurveyMonkey, died in 2015*.

“The debate around social media has changed beyond recognition since those early days. To say it hasn’t always been easy is an understatement,” she said in her Facebook post. “But it should be hard. The products we make have a huge impact, so we have the responsibility to build them in a way that protects privacy and keeps people safe.”

*This story has been amended since initial publication to note that Goldberg was Sandberg’s second husband.