Liberal media blames Trump, capitalism, and toxic business culture amidst Sheryl Sandberg's Facebook departure

Sheryl Sandberg, one of the most influential executives in tech, announced her resignation from Facebook parent company Meta on Wednesday after 14 years, but offered few details.

A new report by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday suggests that part of her decision were ongoing investigations into her actions using her position and company resources for personal reasons.

WSJ reported in April that Sandberg pressured the Daily Mail not to publish a story about a 2014 restraining order against her then-boyfriend, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, on two occasions – in 2016 when they began dating, then in 2019 when the two broke up.

Sandberg had allegedly suggested that the Mail’s business relationship with Facebook may change if the story was published.

After contacting Meta about the story, WSJ heard their inquiry dovetailed with the company’s own investigation into Sandberg’s activities. This included a previously unreported review of corporate resources to help plan her upcoming wedding to her fiancé, consultant Tom Bernthal.

That internal review is ongoing as of May, reports WSJ, and Meta has denied the investigations are related to Sandberg’s resignation.

“None of this has anything to do with her personal decision to leave,” Meta spokeswoman Caroline Nolan said.

But already, Sandberg is getting some support from prominent writers on the left who suggest the high powered female executive is getting a raw deal.  

"As tempting as it might be to reduce Sandberg’s career to a hero-turned-villain story, it is far more useful as a guide to American culture and politics in the years between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s. In those two decades of head-spinning optimism, leaders like Sandberg became convinced that liberals could harness capitalism, using it to make themselves fabulously wealthy while also making the world a fairer, more just place. Their failures highlight the limits, if not the delusion, of that vision," writes Columbia University associate research scholar Nicole Hemmer for CNN. 

Kara Swisher, a writer for the New York Times Opinion page echoed that sentiment, but conceded that Sandberg's sudden departure could diminish the legacy she helped create for women in the business world. 

"Her accomplishment of creating a truly massive, moneymaking machine out of the chaos she took on when she left Google for Facebook in 2008 is nothing short of spectacular. She has been lauded for Facebook’s tremendous success and private wealth creation and also her focus on women in the workplace in her landmark 2013 “Lean In” book, which made her a major corporate star, the likes of which tech had not seen ever and has not since.

"But it adds up to one of the more unfortunate career trajectories I can think of, given that Sandberg is walking away from her tenure with a reputational hit, one that few male executives on her level have received. Many will continue to blame Sandberg for Facebook’s toxic, attention-driven business model."

Helaine Olen of the Washington Post framed Sandberg as an optimist who underestimated the power of male influence in the business world, and then said everything for women came "crashing down" with the election of President Donald Trump.

"Sandberg seemed convinced that the issue wasn’t that men wanted to keep women back. In her view, most of us, male or female, were victims of convention and self-defeating habits, and that could be changed. It always seemed a bit rosy... 

"It all began crashing down to Earth in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. Women began leaning in not just to the corner office, but in opposition to his presidency — and, at least in the short term, it seemed to have no effect at all...

"What “Lean In” also failed to acknowledge is that whatever gains women make are not necessarily secure. Progress is not a line ascending ever higher; it can all go into a sudden reverse," she concluded. 

Sandberg joined Facebook as chief operating officer in 2008 and was largely responsible for building out its advertising business, which brought in almost $115 billion in revenue last year.

The 52-year-old executive has also overseen many of the company’s public responses to its scandals, like Cambridge Analytica, the genocide in Myanmar, and the leaking of an internal report on how Instagram was harming teen girls’ mental health. Burnout is another reason Sandberg is stepping away from Meta, according to WSJ.

She wrote of her experience as second-in-command to Mark Zuckerberg in her 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead , becoming one of the most prominent women in business.  

In 2018, Swisher wrote an Opinion piece for the New York Times in which she suggested that Sandberg unfairly took blame for Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg whom she described as, "unkillable, unfireable and untouchable, and no amount of leaning in by Ms. Sandberg or any other woman in tech is going to change that."

In that column she suggested that Sandberg took more heat for "the Cambridge Analytica scandal, account hacks, and Russians running wild over its platform" than Zuckerberg.

"To be clear, as the No. 2 in charge, Ms. Sandberg deserves much blame for the bad decisions at Facebook. But it’s notable that she is under much more fire than Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive. While he underwent some scrutiny at Congressional hearings and in interviews, he has somehow managed to come off like a geek who has lost his way in the woods. Whatever blame he got has dissipated quickly."