In a shocking announcement on Wednesday, Meta’s chief operating officer said that Sheryl Sandberg will leave her job as Mark Zuckerberg’s longtime assistant.
Forbes says that Sandberg is one of the most powerful women in Big Tech, with an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion. She said in a Facebook post that she will step down in the fall, but she will still be on the board of directors for the company.
Sandberg said, “When I took this job in 2008, I hoped to be in it for five years.” “After 14 years, it’s time for me to start writing the next part of my story.”
The company’s chief growth officer, Javier Olivan, will take over for Sandberg, who is 52 years old.
When Sandberg joined Facebook, it was still a small company in Silicon Valley that had not yet gone public. Many people saw her as the “adult in the room” who helped lead the company to its IPO in 2012.
Sandberg said on Wednesday, “Mark is a true visionary and a caring leader.” “When we met, he was 23 and I was 38, but together we’ve been through the huge ups and downs of running this business.”
In a separate Facebook post on Wednesday, Zuckerberg called Sandberg “an amazing person, leader, partner, and friend.”
Sandberg said she plans to marry her boyfriend, Tom Bernthal, this summer. After she leaves her job, she will focus on helping other people. Dave Goldberg, the CEO of SurveyMonkey, was her first husband. He died at 47 after having a heart attack while they were on vacation in Mexico. There were two kids in the family. Bernthal, who is 50 years old and makes TV shows, has three children.
After telling The Puck about her decision, Sandberg said, “This job has been the greatest honour and privilege of my life, but it doesn’t leave me much time to do other things.” “It isn’t the easiest job anyone has ever had.”
The New York Times said that Sandberg called Zuckerberg over the weekend to tell him she was leaving.
One tech analyst told The Post that Sandberg’s resignation happened in an unusually short amount of time. He said that most high-level executive power changes are announced at least six months in advance.
Dan Ives, the managing director of Wedbush Securities, said, “She just ripped off the Band-Aid.”
Ives told The Post that Sandberg “couldn’t have left at a worse time” because Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other apps, is spending billions of dollars on a bold plan to focus on “metaverse” products for virtual reality.
Many investors have been wary of the metaverse push, and so far this year, shares of the company are down 44.3%.
In May, the Menlo Park, California-based social media giant Facebook put a freeze on hiring for some departments.
Ives said, “She’s leaving just as Facebook moves to the metaverse, even though it won’t start making money for another three to five years.”
When Sandberg said she was leaving, Meta shares dropped more than 3 percent right away. They then went up a little bit, but ended the day down 2.6 percent.
Ives said that many people on Wall Street saw Sandberg as a key way to stop Zuckerberg from acting on his own in times of trouble.
“Zuckerberg isn’t seen as the Sully Sullenberger of the business world,” he said.
Sandberg told The Puck that she has faith in the team she will be leaving behind.
“I really trust the team we have in charge,” she said. “Mark and I have worked hard to build a great team.”
The Times said in July 2017 that Sandberg and Zuckerberg had become “increasingly separated” while Trump was in office. The report said that Zuckerberg couldn’t count on Sandberg, who was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton and a “reliable and prominent Democratic bundler,” as the company dealt with waves of political scandals.
At the time, Facebook denied the stories and said there were no “fault lines” between the two.
Sandberg wrote the motivational book “Lean In,” which is about women in the workplace.
After she graduated from Harvard, she worked at Google and in the Clinton administration’s Treasury Department before joining Facebook.
She also wrote a book called “Option B” about how she dealt with her grief after her husband died in a terrible accident.
Six weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal said that she had twice asked the Daily Mail to stop writing stories that could be bad for her then-boyfriend Bobby Kotick, who was the CEO of Activision Blizzard at the time.
According to the Journal, Kotick told his colleagues that Sandberg told the Daily Mail that if they wrote an article about the situation, it could hurt their relationship with Facebook. Facebook’s platform is a major source of traffic and revenue for many media outlets.
People said that Sandberg and her team were worried that a bad report about Kotick would hurt her reputation as a woman’s rights activist. This includes her work with the non-profit group Lean In.
Meta did not respond right away to a request for comment on Sandberg’s resignation. According to the Journal, Meta opened an investigation to see if Sandberg broke company rules after the story came out.
Some people on Twitter pointed out that Sandberg’s post on Facebook came just minutes after the jury decided the case between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp.
Someone on Twitter joked, “Sheryl Sandberg is the queen of news dumps.”
“Sandberg is trying to get away while there is a flood of news,” someone else said.
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