Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and its parent company Meta, has announced she will step down from her role, ending 14 years in the job that made her one of the most powerful figures in the tech world and saw the company weather a meteoric rise and multiple controversies.
Sandberg announced the move in a post on her own Facebook page on Wednesday, adding that she was not sure of what the future holds for her but plans to focus on her foundation and philanthropic work going forward.
She said she will leave the company this fall, but will continue to be on Meta’s board and thanked Meta founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg for his support, saying “sitting by Mark’s side for these 14 years has been the honor and privilege of a lifetime”.
“When I took this job in 2008, I hoped I would be in this role for five years,” she wrote. “Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life.”
The billionaire executive has been one of Facebook’s most prominent public faces since joining in 2008, shaping its policies and overseeing responses to the myriad public controversies the company has battled.
Her departure comes as Meta continues to weather a financial storm and shifts away from social media into virtual reality.
Facebook rebranded in October 2021 to Meta, attempting to move its primary business away from social media and into virtual reality after a series of difficult years. Zuckerberg has bet big on his hopes for the “metaverse”, an augmented and virtual reality space where people can interact through avatars in a shared world.
Meta has earmarked $10bn for the metaverse over the next year and plans to consistently spend more in coming years, Zuckerberg announced in a 2021 earnings report.
In a comment on Sandberg’s post announcing her leave, Zuckerberg said she had “architected our ads business, hired great people, forged our management culture, and taught me how to run a company”. He said in a post on his own page that Sandberg’s position would not be filled, and announced restructuring of existing roles at the company.
Zuckerberg said that Javier Olivan, the vice president of central products, will be promoted to chief operating officer and take on some of the advertising-related responsibilities previously under Sandberg’s purview. Justin Osofsky, Instagram’s chief operating officer, will now oversee AI-trained content production across platforms.
“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 organized separately from our products,” he wrote.
Sandberg’s departure also comes after billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel stepped down from Meta’s board, following the company’s worst-ever earnings report, suggesting some power players may be jumping ship as the company flounders.
Most recently Sandberg and Facebook had faced increased scrutiny after documents leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen were turned over to Congress and published by a number of news outlets.
The documents revealed the extent to which Meta knew about the aggressive spread of misinformation and hate speech on its platform, that it was reluctant to censor rightwing news organizations for fear of angering the Trump administration, and how it struggled to crack down on human trafficking operations advertised on Instagram. It also revealed internal studies that showed grave mental health effects of the platform on teens.
Sandberg referenced in her departure missive the ways the tech landscape has evolved since she began at the company.
“The debate around social media has changed beyond recognition since those early days,” she wrote. To say it hasn’t always been easy is an understatement. 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.”
Sandberg joined the company four years after its founding to be “the adult in the room”, analysts have said, attempting to help navigate the company through the scandals that ensued along with its vast user growth. She quickly gained notoriety as one of the most visible and most powerful female executives globally, with previous positions at Google and the Clinton administration. In 2013 she published her female empowerment manifesto Lean In.
As backlash mounted over the whistleblower documents in 2021, Sandberg and Zuckerberg avoided making public comment on the revelations, instead leaving Nick Clegg, the vice-president of global affairs, and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, to manage the official response to the revelations.
Sandberg’s behavior at Facebook has been scrutinized in the past. She reportedly asked Facebook employees to examine George Soros’s finances after he criticized the social media giant and she was called before Congress in 2018 to testify about misinformation and manipulation surrounding the 2018 elections.
It also recently came to light that Sandberg allegedly pressured the Daily Mail to drop unflattering stories about her romantic partner Bobby Kotnick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard.
Reuters contributed reporting