Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has permanently left Meta. It was already known that the top woman would leave sometime this year, but Sandberg has definitively no longer fulfilled the role since this week.
Sandberg’s departure on August 1 is final, according to a statement to the US stock market watchdog SEC. It states that the role of chief operating officer has been taken over by Javier Oliván with effect from that date. Sandberg himself will remain with the company until September 30. After that, she will remain a member of Meta’s board of directors, but she will no longer be an employee of the company.
With Sandberg’s departure, an era comes to an end. Sandberg has been Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand man since 2008 as director of operations. She thus had one of the most important roles in the company, which was only four years old when she took office. Sandberg’s input was vital to the gigantic growth that Facebook experienced in the years that followed.
Earlier this summer, it was announced that Sandberg would stop at the company. That was supposed to happen sometime in the fall, but a definitive date was not yet known. Sandberg herself says that she is ‘ready for new challenges’, but her departure does coincide with the important turn that Meta wants to make towards designing a metaverse. Sandberg is succeeded by Javier Oliván, but the role of COO is diminishing. For example, the personnel policy now falls under the responsibility of CEO Zuckerberg.
