Background and career
Sheryl Kara Sandberg (born August 28, 1969) is an American technology executive, philanthropist and writer. She was the chief operating officer of Meta Platforms from 2008 to 2022 and is the founder of LeanIn.Org. Sandberg is the first woman to have been elected to Facebook's board of directors. As head of the company's advertising business, Sandberg has been credited for making the company profitable. Prior to joining Facebook as its COO, Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google and was involved in its philanthropic arm Google.org. Sandberg graduated from Harvard University, later serving as a research assistant to Lawrence Summers at the World Bank and subsequently his chief of staff when he became Bill Clinton's United States Secretary of the Treasury. In 2012, she was named in the Time 100, an annual list of the most influential people in the world. On Forbes magazine's 2021 billionaires list, Sandberg is reported to have a net worth of US$1.7 billion, owing to her stock holdings in Facebook and in other companies. In 2022, she announced she would be stepping down from Meta in the fall but would remain on its board. In January 2024, she announced that she would not stand for re-election to the board in May 2024. As of July 2025, Sandberg's net worth is estimated to be $2.4 billion according to Forbes. As of March 2026 Sheryl Sandberg has joined the board of British AI startup Nscale.
Sandberg was born on August 28, 1969, in Washington, D.C. into a Jewish family. She is the eldest of three children, born to Adele (née Einhorn) and Joel Sandberg. Her father is an ophthalmologist, while her mother, a college professor of French, has roots tracing back to Belarus, as her grandparents were immigrants from there. Her family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida, when she was two years old. She attended North Miami Beach High School, from which she graduated in 1987 ranked ninth in her class. She was sophomore class president, became a member of the National Honor Society, and was on the senior class executive board. Sandberg taught aerobics in the 1980s while in high school. In 1987, Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College. She graduated in 1991 summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and was awarded the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics. While at Harvard, she co-founded an organization called Women in Economics and Government. She also met Professor Lawrence Summers, who became her mentor and thesis adviser. Summers recruited her to be his research assistant at the World Bank, where she worked for approximately one year on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness. In 1993, she enrolled at Harvard Business School and in 1995 she earned her MBA degree, graduating with the highest distinction. In her first year of business school, she earned a fellowship.
After graduating from business school in the spring of 1995, Sandberg worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company for approximately one year (1995–1996). From 1996 to 2001 she again worked for Lawrence Summers, who was then serving as the United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, as his chief of staff. Sandberg assisted in the Treasury's work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis. Sandberg joined Google in 2001, where she was responsible for online sales of Google's advertising and publishing products as well as for sales operations of Google's consumer products and Google Book Search. During her time at Google, she grew the ad and sales team from four people to 4,000.
In late 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, met Sandberg at a Christmas party held by Dan Rosensweig. Zuckerberg had no formal search for a chief operating officer, but thought of Sandberg as "a perfect fit" for this role. In March 2008, Facebook announced the hiring of Sandberg for the role of COO and her leaving Google. After joining the company, Sandberg quickly began trying to figure out how to make Facebook profitable. Before she joined, the company was "primarily interested in building a really cool site; profits, they assumed, would follow." By late spring, Facebook's leadership had agreed to rely on advertising, "with the ads discreetly presented"; by 2010, Facebook became profitable. According to Facebook, (as of 2012) she oversaw the firm's business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy and communications. In 2012, she became the eighth member of Facebook's board of directors. In April 2014, it was reported that Sandberg had sold more than half of her shares in Facebook since the company went public. At the time of Facebook's IPO, she held approximately 41 million shares in the company; by 2019, after several rounds of sales, she owned 17.2 million shares, 0.5 per cent of the company, worth about $1 billion; by 2024, she owned 0.64 million. The New York Times published a report in 2018 detailing Sandberg's role in handling Facebook's public relations after revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and its Cambridge Analytica data scandal. According to The Wall Street Journal, during a meeting, Zuckerberg blamed Sandberg personally for the outcome of the scandal, and that Sandberg "confided in friends that the exchange rattled her, and she wondered if she should be worried about her job." On November 29, 2018, The New York Times reported that Sandberg had personally asked Facebook's communications staff to conduct research into George Soros's finances days after Soros publicly criticized tech companies, including Facebook, at the World Economic Forum. In a statement, Facebook said the research into Soros "was already underway when Sheryl [Sandberg] sent an email asking if Mr. Soros had shorted Facebook's stock." On June 1, 2022, Sandberg announced she would be leaving Meta as COO in the fall of 2022 but would remain on the board of directors. Stating a reason for stepping down, Sandberg stated "it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life." In January 2024, she announced that she would be stepping down from the board in May and not running for re-election. In January 2025, vice chancellor of the Delaware Chancery Court J. Travis Laster imposed sanctions on Sandberg for deleting emails from her personal account related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. These emails were relevant to the 2018 shareholder lawsuit, and deleting them violated a litigation hold.
In 2009, Sandberg was named to the board of The Walt Disney Company. She also serves on the boards of Women for Women International, the Center for Global Development, and V-Day. She was previously a board member of Meta, Starbucks, Brookings Institution, and Ad Council.
In 2021, Sandberg and her husband, Tom Bernthal, launched Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners to invest their own capital in start-ups. In November 2023, Sandberg's investment company invested in Cercle, an AI healthcare business. In April 2024, she invested in Pigment SAS, a French software company, as part of a $145 million round.
