Top woman Sheryl Sandberg has permanently left Meta

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 stopped playing the role since this week.

Sandberg’s departure on August 1 is final, it says 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 as of that date. Sandberg himself will remain with the company until September 30. After that, she remains a member of Meta’s board of directors, but is no longer 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 started. 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 would happen sometime in the fall, but a definite date was not yet known. Sandberg herself says she is “up for new challenges,” but her departure coincides with Meta’s important turn to designing a metaverse. Sandberg is succeeded by Javier Oliván, but the role of coo is getting smaller. For example, personnel policy is now the responsibility of CEO Zuckerberg.