Sheryl Sandberg to leave Meta's board of directors

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Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta, has said she will stand down from the Facebook and Instagram parent’s board of directors in May after 12 years.

Announcing the departure in a Facebook post, Sandberg wrote: “After I left my role as COO, I remained on the board to help ensure a successful transition.” The Meta business was “strong and well-positioned for the future, so this feels like the right time to step away”, she added.

Although she would not stand for re-election to Meta’s board in May, Sandberg said she would remain as an adviser. In a comment on the Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, which was founded as Facebook in 2004, thanked Sandberg for “the extraordinary contributions you have made to our company and community over the years”.

Sandberg stepped down as chief operating officer of Meta in June 2022 after 14 years with the company, in a shock departure that cost Zuckerberg one of his closest lieutenants.

Sandberg, 54, was one of Facebook’s early executives, helping it to grow from a start-up with no revenue into a digital advertising behemoth. She became one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley and positioned herself as an advocate for women in the workplace, writing the feminist call to arms Lean In.

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But she was a polarising figure due to her role in building Facebook’s ads empire and for various controversies during her tenure, including comments she made minimising the notion that it played a role in the events leading to the January 6 2021 storming of the US Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters.

Her departure came at a difficult time for the company, shortly after it faced multiple scandals, including the Cambridge Analytica data privacy controversy and Russian disinformation campaigns surrounding the 2016 US election. The share price had also slumped because of increasing competition and a slowdown in growth. Zuckerberg had changed the company’s name to Meta less than a year earlier as part of a multibillion-dollar pivot to focus on the “metaverse”, a bet that has since been widely criticised.

Sandberg, a committed Democrat, stirred speculation about a possible entry into politics when she left Meta. Since then, she has fought abortion bans, including making a $3mn contribution to the American Civil Liberties Union, and campaigned alongside Israeli officials against sexual violence in its war with Hamas. She has also spent time on philanthropy including her leadership programme called Lean In Girls.