Sheryl Sandberg is to step down from the board of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, less than two years after quitting her executive role at the business.
Sandberg was the lead architect of Facebook’s digital advertising-driven business model as Meta’s chief operating officer.
The 54-year-old stepped down from that role in June 2022 and has now announced she will leave the Meta board after her term ends in May.
“The Meta business is strong and well positioned for the future, so this feels like the right time to step away,” Sandberg wrote in a Facebook post. She said she would become an adviser to the company.
Sandberg resigned from her position as Meta’s operations chief in 2022 after 14 years in the role, having joined Facebook from Google in 2008.
Meta’s chief executive and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, said he looked forward to “a new chapter together”.
Once second-in-command to Zuckerberg, Sandberg was one of the most visible executives at the company.
She faced numerous controversies while chief operating officer of Zuckerberg’s social media empire, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which she admitted the company had been too slow to react to, the use of the Facebook platform in organising the 2021 Capitol riot, and long-running concerns about the mining of users’ data to power Facebook’s hugely successful advertising business. In 2022 advertising accounted for 97% of Meta’s $117bn (£92bn) turnover.
Lou Paskalis, the chief executive of the advertising consultancy AJL Advisory, said Facebook would “not be what it is today without the strong influence of Sheryl Sandberg”.
“In the early years, Sandberg was instrumental at driving adoption of the platform by Fortune 500 companies by circumventing the advertising teams and going directly to CEOs to entice them with the platform’s then unique way for them to engage customers and prospects,” Paskalis said.
Before joining Facebook, Sandberg was the vice-president of global online sales and operations at Google and the chief of staff for the US treasury department under the former president Bill Clinton.
A Harvard graduate, Sandberg is the author of the 2013 feminist manifesto Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which led to the founding of her Lean In Girls charity, which teaches leadership skills to teenagers.
Sandberg has a net worth of $1.9bn, according to Forbes magazine, with the financial data firm FactSet calculating that the former Meta executive had sold $1.8bn of Meta stock by 2022.
