The high-profile executive had been with the company, which changed its corporate name to Meta last year, for 14 years and has been the second most recognizable figure behind CEO Mark Zuckerberg. She is a major political donor to Democrats and has made a name for herself as a women’s advocate.
Sandberg said she planned to focus on her foundation and philanthropy, and would get remarried this summer to Tom Bernthal. Her previous husband Dave Goldberg died in 2015. She said she would continue to serve on the company’s board of directors.
Sandberg’s time with the company has been marked with major successes, including creating one of the wealthiest and most powerful online advertising juggernauts in the world, as well as a steady stream of political controversies. One of the biggest came after the 2016 presidential election, when Russian operatives sowing disinformation abused the service.
Sandberg, who sought for years to position herself as a champion for women in the workplace, authored the best-selling book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” in which she encouraged women to promote themselves in corporate workplaces.
She had been making moves to expand the scope of leaders under her in the year before the announcement, including elevating a key deputy, Marne Levine, to a newly created role of chief business officer, and elevating Nick Clegg to President for Global Affairs.
Zuckerberg said he didn’t plan to replace Sandberg’s role, a sign that the reorganization of duties at the top of the company had already been underway before the announcement on Wednesday.
The title of chief operating officer will go to another longtime Zuckerberg deputy and friend, Javier Olivan, although the role will be more limited in scope.
Sandberg for years was among Zuckerberg’s most trusted deputies, and the founder wrote on his Facebook wall that he met Sandberg when he was 23 years old and “barely knew anything about running a company.” He credited her with “architecting” the company’s booming ad business, hiring great people, and “teaching me how to run a company.”
Sandberg leaves as Facebook’s business is under threat from younger social media apps such as TikTok and Snapchat. Facebook reported it lost daily users for the first time in its 18-year history — falling by about half a million users in the last three months of 2021 prompting the company’s stock to go into a free fall. Facebook later showed modest user growth during the beginning of this year.
Facebook is also trying to remake itself as seller of virtual and augmented reality-powered devices. In October, Facebook renamed itself Meta to signal that the company plans to stake its future on creating the so-called Metaverse — a term used to describe immersive virtual environments that are accessed by virtual and augmented reality. Facebook envisions that people will want to work, play and connect in these new digital realms.
In recent months, Sandberg had focused her attention on being a public champion of small businesses regularly talking with entrepreneurs around the world about how they were adapting their businesses during the pandemic.
Sandberg was also often the face of the company’s criticism of Apple’s new privacy changes which aimed to curtail targeted advertising. Sandberg and other Facebook executives argued that the new changes would hurt small businesses’ ability to tailor their small marketing budgets toward their customers.
