Did Facebook billionaire quit over lavish wedding?
She faced probe into claim she had used company’s resources to plan ceremony
SHE played a key role in turning Facebook into the financial giant it is today.
On top of that Sheryl Sandberg, second in command to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, became a role model for businesswomen all over the world.
Now, having shocked Silicon Valley by quitting Facebook’s parent company Meta this week, Miss Sandberg is making news for – it seems – all the wrong reasons.
Her departure, after 14 years turning Facebook’s advertising business into a £91billion-a-year machine, came amid an investigation she used company resources to plan her forthcoming wedding, it emerged last night.
The author of best-selling female leadership book Lean In is said to have earned a basic pay of £730,000 in 2020 and have a personal fortune of £1.2billion.
She was under review for her nuptials with fiance Tom Bernthal, 48, founder of an LA-based consulting firm, The Wall Street Journal reported. The US newspaper said the review into Miss Sandberg’s ‘use of corporate resources to help plan her coming wedding’ was ‘ongoing’ as of last month. The report did not indicate how exactly Miss Sandberg might have used company resources, though she would have had access to an array of assistants, advisers and corporate jets.
Miss Sandberg, 52, said she is ‘really excited’ about the ceremony, which is due to take place this summer. The couple got engaged in February 2020 and
‘Tense relations with Zuckerberg’
have five children from previous marriages. Miss Sandberg married Brian Kraff in 1993 but divorced a year later. Her second husband, Dave Goldberg, died in May 2015 after falling off a treadmill at a villa in Punta Mita, Mexico and hitting his head.
Speaking recently about her forthcoming wedding, Miss Sandberg said that she ‘never thought this day would come’.
She added: ‘The fact that I can get ready to walk down an actual aisle with someone I love so deeply means everything.’ Miss Sandberg was hired by Mr Zuckerberg in 2008 and was Meta’s first female board member. She was one of the most prominent female executives in the world and has written several books as well as a Ted Talk entitled Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders.
But a number of episodes have tarnished her legacy and relations between Miss Sandberg and Mr Zuckerberg have reportedly become tense in recent years.
Mr Zuckerberg is said to blame her for the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 which saw the UK Information Commissioner’s Office fine Facebook £500,000 for its ‘serious breach’ of the law. The scandal revealed that the Facebook data of 87million people was used for advertising during the 2016 US election that saw Donald Trump elected president.
Miss Sandberg’s power within Meta is said to have been diminishing and she was not at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month.
She was reportedly burned out when she quit and felt she would have been given more support if she were a man.
In a podcast this week Miss Sandberg said that doing her job ‘doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else’. She claimed she wanted to ‘focus more on my philanthropy’ and spend more time with her family. A source said: ‘She sees herself as someone who has been targeted, been tarred as a woman executive in a way that would not happen to a man. Gendered or not, she’s sick of it.’
The appointment of British former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg as Meta’s president of global affairs reinforced Meta’s pivot to politics and diplomacy, which was not Miss Sandberg’s forte.
Caroline Nolan, a Meta spokesman, told the Wall Street Journal: ‘None of this has anything to do with her personal decision to leave.’ Meta was not available for comment yesterday.