Sheryl Sandberg Is Leaving Facebook ⇥ reuters.com

Katie Paul, Reuters:

Meta Platforms Inc Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, whose close partnership with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg powered the growth of the world’s biggest social network, is leaving the company after 14 years, she said in a Facebook post on Wednesday.

[…]

Chief Growth Officer Javier Olivan will take over as chief operating officer, Zuckerberg said in a separate Facebook post, although he added that he did not plan to replace Sandberg’s role directly within the company’s existing structure.

Sandberg stayed at Facebook through the relentless onslaught of self-inflicted scandals and malfeasance that have marked the company’s recent memory. But the writing was on the wall after Facebook posted its first decline in daily active users earlier this year.

This announcement also comes about a year after Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang published “An Ugly Truth”, their exploration of Facebook’s many failures since the mid-2010s. The book contained little new reporting — its most outrageous moments were mostly public knowledge — but it did contain an exploration of the reportedly fraught relationship between Sandberg and Zuckerberg.

For what it is worth, both executives apparently said nice things about each other in their respective announcements. But both were published behind Facebook’s login wall which means I, and anyone else without a Facebook account, cannot read them. Neither has been filed with the SEC either. I am shocked — shocked — to see behaviour like this from a publicly-traded company.