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Co-Managing Director since 2008
Sheryl Sandberg is leaving Facebook’s Meta
06/01/2022, 11:27 p.m
For years she has worked closely alongside Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Now Sheryl Sandberg is leaving the company. In the past there have always been rumors about a cooled relationship with the Facebook boss.
Top manager Sheryl Sandberg, who was long considered the right-hand man of founder Mark Zuckerberg at the Facebook group Meta, is leaving the online giant. “After 14 years I will be leaving Meta,” Sandberg wrote on her Facebook page. The years “at the side of Mark” Zuckerberg, the company’s boss and founder, were a great honor, but now she is stepping down as CEO.
She wants to focus more on her charity activities in the future, says the 52-year-old. The departure is planned for autumn, when their subordinate managers would have gotten new superiors. Meta shares fell about 4 percent as a result of the news of the departure.
Sandberg gained his first experience at Google and joined Facebook in 2008. As the person responsible for the operational business, she played a leading role in the online network growing from a relatively small player in the online business to a billion-dollar corporation.
In recent years there has been speculation about a cooled relationship between the 38-year-old Zuckerberg and Sandberg – which has always been rejected. Sandberg is to remain on the board of directors of Meta, the group’s supervisory body.
Architect of Facebook’s advertising business
CEO Zuckerberg recognized Sandberg as the architect of Facebook’s advertising business. “This is the end of an era,” said billionaire Zuckerberg. He recalled joining Sandberg in 2008 when he was 23. At that time he himself understood nothing about corporate management.
The idea of using insights into users and their interests to give advertisers access to the target groups they wanted proved to be extremely lucrative.
When users switched from PCs to smartphones a decade ago, Facebook was initially unprepared with its banner ads. But Sandberg’s team quickly developed a system in which advertising was placed in the app between the individual posts.
It is “quite unlikely” that she will take a new job in a company or in politics, Sandberg told the financial service Bloomberg. On the other hand, she learned a long time ago not to make any predictions about the future. Sandberg also made a name for herself as an advocate for a bigger role for women in business.
Facebook and Meta are under pressure
At the same time, critics point out that Facebook’s data scandals, such as the controversy surrounding the analysis company Cambridge Analytics, happened under Sandberg in the top floor. In recent years there has been speculation about a cooled relationship between the 38-year-old Zuckerberg and Sandberg – which has always been rejected. Sandberg will remain on the board of directors of Meta, the group’s supervisory body.
Facebook and Meta are currently under pressure from several directions. Politicians are calling for it to be broken up, and competition watchdogs are also increasingly targeting tech giants. Apple’s measures for more data protection on the iPhone also complicate business for Facebook. A year ago, Apple enforced that app developers like Facebook must first obtain users’ explicit permission in order to be able to collect information about their behavior across different services and websites. Many users rejected this.
However, Meta complains that this has made it more difficult to personalize the ads. Sandberg should not be replaced by someone with an identical job, Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. He is not sure if that would have been possible at all, since Sandberg is a “superstar”.
At the same time, however, Zuckerberg also indicated dissatisfaction with the previous design of the meta-structures: The time may have come anyway to dovetail business and products better, he wrote. Facebook has recently felt the competition from the video platform Tiktok with its short video clips. Meta is now targeting its own apps like Facebook and Instagram for similar short videos.