
the staff if the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down from her role as Chief Operating Officer at Meta. Sandberg joined Facebook in 2008 and helped turn the company into an advertising juggernaut. Javier Olivan will take over as COO this fall. Sandberg will now be able to focus more on her philanthropic work. She will continue to serve on Meta’s board of directors.
The inside joke is that Sheryl Sandberg has been on her way out of the company since at least 2011, but it’s never been the right time for the executive, who we are told is hyper-sensitive about her own reputation, to leave.
There was speculation she would move on after the 2012 initial public offering , except it was a disaster, revealing Facebook’s need to make money in mobile advertising. After she fixed that problem, creating a global marketing powerhouse, the rumors turned positive: There was talk she would become the next chief executive officer of Walt Disney Co. or Microsoft Corp.? Or maybe she’d run for public office? Then the 2016 elections where the word was she might have joined Hillary Clinton’s cabinet ,but Donald Trump won the presidency instead and stayed at Facebook as Hillary’s “point man” .
Sandberg’s passion for growing the Facebook i.e. Meta organizations quickly and effectively had a downside: there were blind spots in privacy, and content moderation was a disaster. While the bar is low, Sandberg, is known for being more politically savvy and well-liked than CEO Mark Zuckerberg. She was able to reassure many advertisers, and democratic politicians that the company had their best interests and intentions.
But as we have catalogued scandals kept coming, and the stock price kept sagging .From Cambridge Analytica to the Jan. 6 insurrection, Sandberg lost the public benefit of the doubt. Her apologies and reassurances to regulators and advocacy organizations were no longer helpful. And earlier this year, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. promoted Nick Clegg into the top policy role, instead.
The most recent dust-up, about whether she manipulated the Daily Mail to get them not to publish a story about her former boyfriend, even resulted in an internal probe, but was not the reason she’s leaving, Meta said.
One reason speculation about Sandberg’s next move has been so heated for so long is that her career highlights include helping build the powerful data-based targeted advertising model at Google, and then next at Facebook . And despite her immense impact, she never held the No. 1 job.
Over the last two years, as Meta has been pummeled by successive scandals, speculation mostly ceased about what role Sandberg would choose to ascend to in the wider world. Instead, some wondered if her days were numbered at Meta.