Who Will Replace Sheryl Sandberg? Maybe No One - Slashdot

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Sheryl Sandberg started at a company called Facebook, but stepped down from a changed company called Meta. So who will replace her? No one, suggests the New York Times.

CEO/co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted Wednesday on Facebook that he didn't "plan to replace Sheryl's role in our existing structure." Instead, the Times notes, around 2020 his company has been structured with "four executives who have equally large responsibilities and who answer to and run major decisions by him." (There's the "public face" ambassador, the Metaverse man, and then the overseer of Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook — with another executive handling analytics, infrastructure and growth.)

"But none of them have as much power as Ms. Sandberg used to, when she effectively ran all of the business operations while Mr. Zuckerberg focused on developing Facebook's products..."

Mr. Zuckerberg made the structural shift because he wanted to consolidate his control over all arms of the company, three people close to him said. While Mr. Zuckerberg has always been the undisputed boss, with a majority of the company's voting shares, he shared power with Ms. Sandberg when he was a younger businessman and needed help expanding the company. But with more than 18 years of experience under his belt, he wants to exercise all of his power and be identified more clearly as Meta's sole leader, the people said....

For years, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg had clear-cut responsibilities, which employees often referred to as the "Sandberg side" and "Mark side." Ms. Sandberg ran the business, policy and legal teams with a lot of autonomy, while Mr. Zuckerberg was responsible for the engineering and product teams. That began changing in 2020 after Facebook dealt with scandals involving privacy, misinformation and other toxic content on the platform. Mr. Zuckerberg told his teams that he was done apologizing and wanted to focus more time and attention on innovative products that the company was designing.

Since then, Mr. Zuckerberg has assumed more control over public messaging and policy decisions, which Ms. Sandberg used to handle. He also brought in hires with public policy expertise and promoted longtime executives who were loyal to his vision.