Sheryl Sandberg, longtime co-founder Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook owner Meta, is leaving the tech giant after 14 years as chief operating officer.
Key points:
- Sandberg will leave Meta at the end of the year, but will remain on its board
- Mark Zuckerberg hired her 14 years ago, before Facebook went public
- She says the company has a responsibility to protect privacy and keep people safe
Ms. Sandberg joined Google in 2008, four years before Facebook went public. He has run the Facebook advertising business, now run by Meta, and has been responsible for feeding it since its infancy at a power of more than $ 100 billion a year.
He will leave Meta at the end of the year, but will remain on the company’s board.
“When I took this job in 2008, I was hoping to be in that role for five years. Fourteen years later, it’s time to write the next chapter of my life,” he wrote on his Facebook and Instagram accounts.
She said she was not sure what the future holds, but that she would focus on her family and her philanthropic work.
“Sitting next to Mark for these 14 years has been the honor and privilege of a lifetime. Mark is a true visionary and a supportive leader,” Sandberg wrote.
He also said social media debates had shifted “beyond recognition since those early days.”
“To say it hasn’t always been easy is an understatement, but it should be difficult,” he said.
“The products we make have a huge impact, so we have a responsibility to build them in a way that protects privacy and keeps people safe.”
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Zuckerberg said in his own Facebook post that this was “the end of an era” and did not plan to replace Ms. Sandberg in the existing structure of the company.
“It created opportunities for millions of people around the world and it deserves credit for much of what Meta is today,” he said.
“He’s done a lot for me, for our community and for the world, and we’re all better for it.”
Javier Olivan will be Meta’s new chief operating officer.
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Ms. Sandberg has had a very public job, meeting with politicians, doing focus groups, and talking about issues like women in the workplace, and more recently, abortion rights in the United States.
He has made some public mistakes in the company, including his attempt to divert Facebook’s blame for the January 6, 2021, uprising at the U.S. Capitol.
In an interview later that month, he said he thought the day’s events were “largely organized on platforms that don’t have our ability to stop hatred, don’t have our standards, and don’t have our transparency.” “.
This turned out to be false. Internal documents, revealed by whistleblower Frances Haugen later that year, showed that Facebook employees themselves were concerned about the company’s shutdown and often reversed responses to growing extremism in the United States.
ABC / AP