Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Meta Platforms, has resigned after 14 years running the company along with Mark Zuckerberg. She said in a Facebook post, “It was time to write the next chapter of my life. His departure was tentatively anticipated. Last year an investigation by the Wall Street Journal analyzing internal Facebook data found that The percentage of employees reporting had been shrinking in recent years for Sandberg, 52. There were also rumors of tensions with Zuckerberg and factional rivalry. His legacy is a mixed one. She was instrumental in helping it reach the billion-plus active users that grew Facebook’s advertising business in 2008. She did this with great success: about 97% of its $117 billion 2021 revenue came from selling ads This made him a billionaire.
But Sandberg’s effort paid off. For Facebook users, for healthy discourse, and certainly for democracy itself. Fake news was prevalent on the site for the 2016 presidential election, in which Donald Trump came to power. More recently, a whistleblower accused the company of contributing to the January 6 uprising on Capitol Hill because less was invested in security. To its critics, the company was harming society with its growth-at-value mindset. Some executives who worked with Sandberg have spoken out. Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who helped broker his first meeting with Zuckerberg, wrote “Zucked” and explained that Facebook’s size made it nearly impossible to moderate the different languages and cultures of its users.
WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton also emphasized the determination of Sandberg’s development. In 2014, a few years after selling WhatsApp to Facebook for $19 billion, he proposed monetizing the app through a metered usage model, charging businesses a fraction of a penny for a large number of messages. But in a 2018 interview, he recalled Sandberg dismissing the idea. “Her words were, ‘It won’t scale,'” he told me at the time. Advertising was game.
Still, Sandberg is leaving just as his money-spinning machine is in doubt. Facebook recently said it would lose $10 billion in its 2022 revenue as a result of Apple’s iOS privacy restrictions. And Zuckerberg’s pivot to the metaverse has seen Meta spend more than $10 billion on new technology, many years away from potential mass adoption.
While Zuckerberg’s own Facebook feed is filled with updates about Glove-like Metaverse or Skunkworks projects that can elicit haptic feedback so you can “touch” things in virtual reality, Sandberg has remained silent about it. Over the years his role has been to steer the mundane side of the business, while Zuckerberg pursued exciting projects. In earnings calls, she often touted Facebook’s contributions to small businesses. He testified before Congress in place of Zuckerberg and attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, while the Facebook CEO stayed behind.
A former senior Facebook executive once told me that one thing he knew for sure about Zuckerberg and Sandberg was that they would leave the company if Wall Street wanted them to. This means a drop in the company’s share price to, say, $100. Meta stock closed Wednesday at $188, down 50% from last year’s level of $378. Facebook had a market capitalization of $1 trillion at the time, and is now hovering around $500 billion. Another important figure remains in Facebook’s growth story: Peter Thiel, Facebook’s first outside investor and a guiding hand for Zuckerberg, recently stepped down from its board of directors after 17 years. Although Zuckerberg has publicly stated that he will remain CEO for years to come, his apparent passion for virtual reality has left Facebook increasingly rudderless.
Sandberg and Thiel’s departure comes at a time of great financial uncertainty for Meta. It’s not clear how the company plans to make money in the metaverse, or how much of a privacy change it will take from Apple, or how widely it will have to revisit its algorithms for users in Europe under upcoming online security laws. may have to be designed, potentially harming its growth prospects. In February, Meta reported its first drop in daily active users, suggesting that its business is peaking.
If Sandberg is leaving on a low note, it could have been less if she had waited longer to depart. For users, and perhaps for democracy, the silver lining is that some of the executives driving Facebook toward irresponsible scale are finally out. If Zuckerberg ever gives up his hold on the company as a majority controller of its voting shares, it raises a huge potential for new leadership that could prioritize safety over growth. But for now, the company’s future looks even more uncertain.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology