Likes her as No. 2
Zuck: Hope to work with Sandberg for ‘decades’
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he hopes to work with second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg for “decades” to come despite a series of scandals that have rocked the social media giant.
Zuckerberg and Sandberg have both been heavily criticized for Facebook’s failure to spot Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election, and a recent New York Times report alleges that the company used an opposition research group to promote negative stories about competing tech companies.
“Sheryl is a really important part of this company and is leading a lot of the efforts for a lot of the biggest issues that we have,” Zuckerberg told CNN in an interview that aired Tuesday night. “She’s been an important partner to me for 10 years. I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done together, and I hope that we work together for decades more to come.”
Sandberg, 49, the chief operating officer who was hired away from Google in 2008, has been a crucial “heat shield” for the 34-year-old Zuckerberg, according to NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway. The company is second only to Google in digital advertising.
“Her brand was being manicured with the same resources and care as the gardens of Tokyo,” Galloway told The Associated Press. “And unfortunately a hurricane has come through the garden.”
Zuckerberg told CNN that “a lot of the criticism” of Facebook has been fair, but added that “we have a different world view than some of the folks who are covering us.”
“There are big issues, and I’m not trying to say that there aren’t,” he told CNN. “But I do think that sometimes you can get the flavor from some of the coverage that that’s all there is, and I don’t think that that’s right, either.”
Zuckerberg also questioned the accuracy of the wide-ranging Times story, which described how company leaders ignored indicators that Facebook could potentially allow people to spread hateful messages or even impact elections.
“It is not clear to me at all that the report is right,” Zuckerberg told CNN. “A lot of the things that were in that report, we talked to the reporters ahead of time and told them that from everything that we’d seen, that wasn’t true and they chose to print it anyway.”