Sheryl Sandberg resigns from Facebook parent Meta after 14 years
Sheryl Sandberg resigns as CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta after 14 years, a big shock where CEO Mark Zuckerberg will lose one of his closest lieutenants.
Sandberg, one of the company’s most profiled managers, will leave the business “in the autumn” after a transition period, while he remains on Meta’s board, she said.
In a post on her Facebook page on Wednesday, Sandberg did not outline her reasons for joining the company, as she helped grow from a start-up with no revenue to a digital advertising behemoth. She said she was “not quite sure what the future will bring”[ads1];, but wanted to focus more on her philanthropic endeavors.
Javier Olivan, another longtime employee who is currently the company’s growth manager, will take on the position of operations manager.
Zuckerberg called the move “the end of an era”, adding in his own long Facebook post that the 52-year-old had “architectured our advertising business, hired great people, forged our management culture and taught me how to run a company.”
The shares in the company fell almost 3 percent on the news.
Sandberg, a Harvard graduate, joined Facebook in 2008. She worked for then-US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers under President Bill Clinton, and later grew Google’s advertising business as vice president of global online sales and operations.
The role of “adult in space” when he joined Zuckerberg’s team of twenty-somethings at the time, Sandberg is credited with driving the revenue generation of the business, which floated publicly in 2012 and generated $ 117 billion in revenue in 2021.
During her tenure, she positioned herself as an advocate for women in the workplace, writing the modern feminist call for weapons. Lean in. She also introduced herself as a champion of small businesses that use Facebook to grow.
But as a public figure who once regularly met lawmakers and regulators, she has also been caught in the many scandals about, among other things, privacy and content moderation that have shaken the company in recent years.
Zuckerberg said Olivan would take on a “more traditional COO role”, where he would be “focused internally and operationally, building on his strong track record of making implementation more efficient and rigorous”.
The CEO also announced several other promotions as part of a broader restructuring in the wake of Sandberg’s departure. “I think Meta has reached a point where it makes sense for our product and business groups to be more closely integrated, instead of having all the business and operational functions organized separately from our products,” Zuckerberg said.
