Former Meta COO, Sheryl Sandberg, to Leave Company Board

Former Meta COO, Sheryl Sandberg, to Leave Company Board

By:  Serach Nissim

On Wednesday, Sheryl Sandberg announced that she will not seek re-election to Meta’s board of directors in May.  As reported by the NY Times, Sandberg, a 14-year veteran at the social media giant, had stepped down as chief operating officer in 2022.  In the statement, posted on her personal Facebook page last week, she said she would still be an adviser to the company and would “always be there to help the Meta teams.”

“The Meta business is strong and well positioned for the future, so this feels like the right time to step away,” she wrote.  Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive and founder, commented on her Facebook page, saying Ms. Sandberg had been “instrumental” in driving the company’s success. She had been elected to Facebook’s board of directors in 2012, becoming the first woman on the board, at a time when the company was criticized for having too few women on its board.  Mr. Zuckerberg had first hired her in 2008 to serve as Facebook’s first Chief Operating Officer.

She was there throughout the journey wherein the media networking company turned into a multibillion-dollar endeavor.  Ms. Sandberg became one of the highest-profile female executives in the business world, and authored a best-selling book, “Lean In,” telling about her experience.  The 54-year-old has a net worth of 1.9 billion USD as of 2024, per Forbes.  She first made Forbes’ billionaire list in 2021.  She has been named multiple times in Fortune Magazine’s ranking of the 50 “Most Powerful Women in Business”.

She was replaced as COO by Javier Olivan, a longtime Meta executive, in June 2022.  “It will be a more traditional COO role where Javi will be focused internally and operationally, building on his strong track record of making our execution more efficient and rigorous,” Zuckerberg had said at the time.  Despite Sandberg’s fame and success, her time with the company was not all rosy.  She saw the company face multiple sources of criticism and tumultuous periods. Facebook was accused of becoming a platform for Russians to spread misinformation and manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election.  The company’s privacy and data-collection practices also drew condemnation and lawsuits.

Before joining Facebook, Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google and also worked in its philanthropic arm Google.org, as reported by Wikipedia.  Prior to that, Sandberg had served as research assistant to Lawrence Summers at the World Bank, and later as his chief of staff when he was U.S. Secretary of the Treasury for Bill Clinton.

Sandberg is also a notable philanthropist. In 2016, she renamed her Lean In Foundation to the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, after herself and her late husband. She donated about $100 million in Facebook stock to the foundation and to other charitable organizations.

“And I hope that you – yes, you – have the ambition to lean in to your career and run the world. Because the world needs you to change it. But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance. Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women,” Sandberg writes in her book “Leaning In”, which intends to help professional women achieve their career goals.