Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Zuckerberg’s right-hand man for 14 years, made Facebook one of the GAFAM giants. On Wednesday June 1, however, she announced that she was leaving the juggernaut now called Meta, taking with her a nice sum of money and leaving behind a growing business.
Finished the hen with the golden eggs?
Through advertising, the COO built the Facebook empire in 13 years. The current Meta has seen its revenues increase from $272 million in 2008 to $118 billion in 2021, capturing no less than 25% of the global online advertising market.
That said, the golden age of the social network now seems to be over. As Les Echos point out, “Over the past nine months, Meta shares have lost almost half of their value and the group’s market capitalization, which had exceeded 1,000 billion dollars in the summer of 2021, has fallen back to around 500 billion.”
So it’s time to jump ship.
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1.7 billion shares sold in ten years
Note that Sheryl Sandberg did not leave empty-handed, far from it. Expert in financial manipulations, she had the nose to sell her shares throughout his career, especially when their prices soared. So much so that it has pocketed some $1.7 billion over the past ten years, becoming one of the few people to become a billionaire without ever having been CEO or founder of a company, as reported by Siècle Digital.
If usually, the great leaders tend to keep their shares – a sign that they have confidence in the future prosperity of the company, the former director of operations seemed to have foreseen the blow… or the fall? Today, she has sold more than three quarters of her shares and leaves behind a company at a turning point in its history.
Meta, a new era in difficulty?
While advertising generates its income with more and more difficulties (stricter regulations, new competition, etc.), Marc Zuckerberg recently changed the name of Facebook to focus on the metaverse.
Read also: Metaverse, the Moloch of personal data
But this El Dorado of virtualization, digital and personal data has not yet succeeded in convincing people of its economic viability. With big investments, the entrepreneur tries to give birth to Meta, but his shareholders still seem hesitant. Maybe Sheryl Sandberg was too.
If she announced that she wanted to focus more on her family life as well as on philanthropy, she will nevertheless remain on the board of directors of the social network.