Crypto News: Sheryl's long goodbye

Hey all, it's Sarah Frier in San Francisco. For almost as long as Sheryl Sandberg has been in power at Facebook, there have been rumors of her departure. But first...

Today's must-reads:

• Elon Musk told Tesla employees to work from the office at least 40 hours a week
• GameStop has had mixed results in its shift toward NFTs
• Musk's tunneling startup has big plans for Texas

A former Facebook employee recently joked with me that Sheryl Sandberg has been on her way out of the company since at least 2011, but it's never been the right time for the executive, who is hyper-sensitive about her own reputation, to leave.

There was speculation she would move on after the 2012 initial public offering—except it was a disaster, revealing Facebook's need to make money in mobile advertising. After she fixed that problem, creating a global marketing powerhouse, the rumors turned positive: Maybe she would become the next chief executive officer of Walt Disney Co. or Microsoft Corp.? Or maybe she'd run for public office? That didn't happen either. After the 2016 elections, she might have joined Hillary Clinton's cabinet—but Donald Trump won the presidency instead.

By then, it was clear that Sandberg's passion for growing organizations quickly and effectively had a downside at Facebook: blind spots in privacy, content moderation and societal impact that grew just as fast. Sandberg, known for being more politically savvy and well-liked than CEO Mark Zuckerberg, was able to reassure advertisers, politicians and the public that the company had all the best intentions.

But as the scandals kept coming, from Cambridge Analytica to the Jan. 6 insurrection, Sandberg lost the public benefit of the doubt. Her apologies and reassurances to regulators and advocacy organizations were no longer helpful. And earlier this year, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. promoted Nick Clegg into the top policy role, instead.

The most recent dust-up, about whether she manipulated the Daily Mail to get them not to publish a story about her former boyfriend, even resulted in an internal probe, but was not the reason she's leaving, Meta said.

One reason speculation about Sandberg's next move has been so heated for so long is that she's had one of the most remarkable careers in all of business—helping build the powerful data-based targeted advertising model at Google, and then Facebook, changing the world for better and worse simultaneously. And despite her immense impact, she never held the No. 1 job. Didn't she want to be at the top?

Over the last two years, as Meta has been pummeled by successive scandals, speculation mostly ceased about what role Sandberg would choose to ascend to in the wider world. Instead, some wondered why she stayed on at Meta, even as she spent less time in top strategy meetings and making public appearances—and stopped posting quite so much about her day job on social media.

Now, she says taking another job in business or politics is "pretty unlikely." From here, she could fade into the background. She is a multi-billionaire, after all. Or, like other former Meta executives, she could show us what she really wants to do, unencumbered after 14 years of working for someone else. —Sarah Frier

The uncertain prospects of a looming Elon Musk takeover is dampening morale at Twitter. Employees say they're incentivized to focus on short-term growth instead of riskier long-term projects like newsletters or audio products. And workers' messages in internal Slack groups show Musk has alienated many of them.