Many years ago, when Facebook was an entity most people had warm – or at least neutral – feelings towards, I visited the company’s HQ in Menlo Park, California. I admired the free restaurants and leisure facilities. I sneered at the “graffiti wall”, where Facebook employees were invited to grab a felt-tip and answer the question: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” (Say something negative about Facebook, perhaps.) And I attended a presentation by then chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who was surprisingly nervous; I recall noticing how her voice shook as she addressed the smirking European hacks. Then I went to the gift shop and bought Facebook-branded hoodies for my kids.
Obviously I wouldn’t put them in Facebook gear now. Over the past decade or so the evolution of Facebook (now Meta) in general and Sandberg in particular has been one of slow then fast descent from corporate brave new world to something much grimmer and more familiar. In the New York Times this week, details of a new memoir by a Facebook whistleblower, the very existence of which was kept under wraps by the publisher until a few days before, were shared and – how else to put this: bloody hell.
That Zuckerberg is a men’s rights shill for Trump, running a company with a profit model reliant on hate speech and false information, is something we already know. What I hadn’t seen coming was the exposure of Sandberg for reportedly running up $13,000 in lingerie purchases and allegedly trying to persuade the author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, to join her in the only bed on the corporate jet on the way back from a work trip to Europe. The author’s response, detailed in her book Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work, might generously be described as lean out.
Wynn-Williams worked for Facebook for seven years, rising to the role of director of global public policy before being fired in 2018. Her revelations about Sandberg are the book’s most lurid and at the same time least consequential; for the most shocking details, see claims about Zuckerberg sucking up to China, lying to Congress and failing to stop hate speech fuelling genocide in Myanmar against the minority Rohingya ethnic group.
Still, as a portrait of Sandberg it marks a strange end point to the public image of a woman once hailed, if not as a feminist hero or even as a feminist at all beyond the narrow confines of self-interest, then as a person advancing the credible cause of raising the number of women in the C-suite. Sandberg always seemed uptight and uncomfortable in her public role, a decade older than the men she worked for and not a tech person but a corporate nerd. I once overheard her describe herself during a photoshoot as a “suburban mom”, which was as nauseating as her other ploys for relatability during the my-kids-get-nits-too PR drive for her book Lean In.
And yet, while Sandberg’s dive into corporate feminism was maddeningly ahistorical and apolitical, I still think it was broadly sincere. It is routine, now, to refer to her as a piece of liberal camouflage behind which Zuckerberg advanced his antidemocratic designs, but I suspect that wasn’t the plan back in 2013 when Lean In was first published. Was the book mired in bullshit? Yes. Was it part of some grand evil plan? I doubt it.
Still, here we are. Sandberg, who is estimated to be worth over $2bn, left her job as COO of Meta in 2022, quit the company’s board two years later and has reportedly fallen out with Zuckerberg, who, it can be said with some confidence, failed to onboard the lessons of Lean In. According to a piece in the New York Times in January, the CEO of Meta badmouthed Sandberg to Stephen Miller, Trump’s ghoulish adviser, for creating Facebook’s culture of inclusivity, adding to his other complaint that corporate culture has become too “feminine”.
And now this further twist! Just when one might be tempted to side with Sandberg as the least gross of a very grim group, along comes Careless People – named for the line about Tom and Daisy, the wealthy wreckers in The Great Gatsby – and back we go to square one. The author claims to have witnessed a 26-year-old assistant sleeping in Sandberg’s lap and the pair stroking each other’s hair. And then came the demand from Sandberg for Wynn-Williams to join her in the bed on the jet. (Wynn-Williams demurred.)
Sandberg hasn’t commented on any of this publicly yet, but Meta put out a statement calling Careless People “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”, and trashing Wynn-Williams as someone who was “fired for poor performance and toxic behaviour”, who is working for “anti-Facebook activists”.
What to make of it all, beyond the fact that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely? In the book, Wynn-Williams, who was a true Facebook believer when she joined the company in 2011, came to see Sandberg’s Lean In persona as a “shtick” covering up what she really wanted from other people: obedience – something that rings true not only for Sandberg, but in the wider political and corporate culture in which we now live.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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