Sheryl Sandberg steps down from Facebook-parent Meta, leaving behind a mixed legacy

In a Facebook post Wednesday, she announced that her 14-year tenure with Meta had come to an end.

The advertising business on Facebook has ballooned to nearly three billion dollars, thanks in part to the personal data the platform aggressively collects from its users. The company's power increased and she continued to make strategic decisions.

The honor and privilege of sitting by Mark for these 14 years has been written in the post. He says that we have been together for a long time. When we met, he was 23 and I was 38.

She isn't entirely sure what her future will hold, but she will likely focus more on my foundation and philanthropic work.

The legacy of the social networking giant is subject to debate.

She built an ad business that made her a Wall Street darling and made Facebook worth $525 billion. After the publication of her book, Lean In, which established her as a champion for women in the workplace, the goodwill she enjoyed within and without the tech industry waned.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal and the highjacking of Facebook by Trump-supporting Russian content farms in 2016 caused the image of Sandberg to suffer. The New York Times piece highlighted the fact that Sandberg was responsible for those failures. She was seen as a well- connected fixer who worked to quiet any distraction from the smooth operation of her company's lucrative ad business.

Meta's chief growth officer, who was a founding member of the company's first growth team in the early 2000s, will replace Sandberg. The growth team has become a power center within the company.

The growth team instigated Facebook's acquisition of an Israeli startup that had created a stripped-down version of Facebook that could run on basic phones. By the year of 2017, it had 200 million users in countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Nigeria.

The social network was slow to adopt the smartphone revolution in the late 2000s, but it was the mobile app that brought it to three billion users. Facebook rebranded itself to Meta, ostensibly to align itself with a new crucial access technology, which will give users access to the metaverse.