While you were asleep: Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to resign

After she spent 14 years at Facebook/Meta and helped transform the company into a profits machine and reached new heights of prominence, Sheryl Sandberg resigned from her position as chief operating officer at the social media giant.

Sandberg won’t be leaving Meta completely and will remain on the board before she leaves her COO position later this year. Javier Olivan, who has led the company’s growth efforts for years, will replace her as the new chief operating officer.

When she joined the company back in 2008 it was still a tech start-up that was beginning to find world prominence, and Sandberg helped the company to transition from a start-up to a social media giant, able to generate almost $120 billion a year in revenue.

Sandberg has been the highest-profile public face of the company alongside co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, and she has championed the business’s philosophy of growing quickly and sorting out the problems later.

She has spent years trying to build public trust in the company following issues with content moderation and lapses in privacy protection.

In an interview with Bloomberg, she called her time with the company an “honour and a privilege of a lifetime” but jokingly added it was “not the most manageable job anyone has ever had.”

Meta’s shares slipped 2.6% in New York following the announcement while the social media company’s shares have dropped a significant 44% since the start of the year.

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