Sheryl Sandberg Stepping Down as COO of Facebook Parent Meta Platforms

Sheryl Sandberg on Wednesday said she will be leaving her role as chief operating officer of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., FB -2.58%▼ closing out her tenure helping lead one of the world’s most profitable and controversial companies.

In a post on her Facebook profile, Ms. Sandberg wrote that she will step down from the role that she has held for 14 years this fall, but will continue to serve as a member of Meta’s board. In a securities filing, Meta said she informed the company on Saturday of her intention to resign.

Javier Olivan, currently chief growth officer, will take over as the company’s COO when Ms. Sandberg leaves.

During her time as the company’s COO, Ms. Sandberg built out the business side of the company, turning a free-to-access social media startup founded in a Harvard dorm room into one of the biggest advertising companies on the planet. Last year, the company reported nearly $115 billion in advertising revenue.

Ms. Sandberg was the longtime lieutenant to Mr. Zuckerberg, and in that role—and as the author of the leadership book “Lean In”—became one of the most prominent women in business.

Ms. Sandberg, 52 years old, wrote that she doesn’t yet know what she will do next.

“Sheryl architected our ads business, hired great people, forged our management culture, and taught me how to run a company,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Wednesday. “She created opportunities for millions of people around the world, and she deserves the credit for so much of what Meta is today.”

As part of the reshuffling, Marne Levine, the company’s chief business officer, will report to Mr. Olivan.

I don’t plan to replace Sheryl’s role in our existing structure,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote. “I’m not sure that would be possible since she’s a superstar who defined the COO role in her own unique way.”

“But even if it were possible, I think Meta has reached the point where it makes sense for our product and business groups to be more closely integrated,” Mr. Zuckerberg added.

Prior to her arrival at Facebook, Ms. Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google.

After joining Facebook, when Mr. Zuckerberg was only 23 years old, she became the company’s business strategist and resident grown-up, with direct responsibility for advertising sales, legal and policy issues. That structure allowed Mr. Zuckerberg to focus on engineering challenges.

As the company grew into a tech giant, Ms. Sandberg’s profile rose along with it. She wrote two bestselling books, gave commencement speeches and was a regular at high-profile gatherings of influential political figures and business executives, such as those in Davos, Switzerland and Sun Valley, Idaho. A longtime Democrat, she was also regularly mentioned as a potential candidate for office or cabinet member.

Ms. Sandberg’s husband, Dave Goldberg, died in 2015 while the two were vacationing in Mexico. Her grief and how she recovered from it were the subject of her second book, called Option B.

In recent years, Facebook became embroiled in a series of controversies around issues including data privacy and user safety, and Ms. Sandberg’s role leading the company led to intense criticism at times.

In 2018, Ms. Sandberg testified before Congress about election interference involving social media.

That same year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Zuckerberg told Ms. Sandberg that he blamed her and her teams for the public fallout over Cambridge Analytica, the research firm that inappropriately accessed private data on Facebook users and used it for political research.

Ms. Sandberg later confided in friends that she wondered if she should be worried about her job.

Last year the Journal also wrote a series of investigative stories about the company, called The Facebook Files, that was based on thousands of internal documents and described the flaws in its platforms and the harms they cause users, among other issues. One of the articles cited internal data to show that Ms. Sandberg’s portfolio within the company, as measured by staffers that report to her, has been shrinking in recent years.

In her post announcing her departure, Ms. Sandberg paid tribute to her longtime partnership with Mr. Zuckerberg.

“He sometimes says that we grew up together, and we have,” she wrote. “In the critical moments of my life, in the highest highs and