After fourteen years of copiloting the world’s largest social media company, Sheryl Sandberg has resigned from Facebook. Hannah Murphy reports for the Financial Times:
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.
Read more here.