Sheryl Sandberg Age, Boyfriend, Husband, Family, Biography, & More

Bio/Wiki
Full Name	Sheryl Kara Sandberg [1]The New York Times
Names Earned	The Sheryl Kara Sandberg [2]The New York Timesfirst lady of Facebook [3]The Guardian
Profession(s)	Business Executive, Chief Operating Officer at Meta (Facebook) (2008-2022)
Physical Stats & More
Height (approx.)	in centimeters- 163 cm in meters- 1.63 m in feet & inches- 5’ 4 ”
Eye Color	Black
Hair Color	Black
Personal Life
Date of Birth	August 28, 1969 (Thursday)
Age (as of 2022)	53 Years
Birthplace	Washington, D.C.
Zodiac sign	Virgo
Signature
Nationality	American
Hometown	North Miami Beach, Florida
School	• Highland Oaks Middle School, Ojus, North Miami-Dade, Florida • North Miami Beach High School, North Miami Beach, Florida Note: She entered North Miami Beach High School when she was in 10th grade.
College/University	• Harvard University, Cambridge • Harvard Business School, Boston
Educational Qualification	• Bachelor of Arts in Economics at Harvard University, Cambridge (1987-1991) • Master of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Boston (1993-1995)
Religion	Judaism [4]The Forward
Political Inclination	During the 2016 presidential elections, Sheryl Sandberg lent her support to the Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. [5]Politico During the 2020 elections, although Sheryl hinted that was likely to support a Democratic candidate, she declined to endorse Elizabeth Warren. [6]CNBC
Controversies	Russian Interference in the 2016 United States Elections In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg came under public scrutiny after being accused of first ignoring and then trying to conceal Russia’s use of Facebook to disrupt the 2016 U.S. election. Previously, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to investigate the Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 United States presidential election. The The Mueller report suggested that the first method of Russian interference was done through the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which waged anti-Clinton and pro-Trump advertisements on Facebook and other social media platforms. The report read, [7]The Verge In total the IRA-controlled [Facebook] accounts made over 80,000 posts before their deactivation in August 2017, and these posts reached at least 29 million U.S persons and 'may have reached an estimated 126 million people'.” In November 2018, The New York Times in its article accused Zuckerberg and Sandberg of deflecting the criticism onto their competitors like Twitter and YouTube. [8]The New York Times Furious on the allegations leveled against her, Sheryl took Facebook and wrote, [9]CNBC which read, "Mark and I have said many times we were too slow. But to suggest that we weren’t interested in knowing the truth, or we wanted to hide what we knew, or that we tried to prevent investigations, is simply untrue…As Mark and I both told Congress, leading up to Election Day in November 2016, we detected and dealt with several threats with ties to Russia and reported what we found to law enforcement.” Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal In March 2018, Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Christopher Wylie disclosed that personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent by Cambridge Analytica in 2015 for political advertising. Cambridge Analytica is a political consultancy that worked on the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. The data helped the consultancy to target users that were more prone to impulsive anger or conspiratorial thinking than average citizens to manipulate US elections. Consequently, Facebook received criticism for serving as a medium of data harvesting for malicious intents of firms like Cambridge Analytica. Later, Mark Zuckerberg paid a £500,000 fine to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office for exposing the data of its users. Amid the controversy, The Wall Street Journal reported that Zuckerberg had blamed Sandberg and her team for the public fallout over Cambridge Analytica during a meeting. [10]Business Insider Although Zuckerberg and Sandberg were in line to give hours of depositions in response to a lawsuit filed against them over the privacy scandal, the company reached a settlement agreement with the plaintiffs in 2022. [11]The Verge United States Capitol attack of 2021 On January 6, 2021, a mob of supporters of Republican President Donald Trump stormed of the United States Capitol to disrupt the joint session of Congress from counting the electoral college votes which would have formalized the victory of Joe Biden. Thereafter, Facebook was accused of playing a role in the fomenting of the Capitol attack by serving as a platform for the organization of the mob and fueling its attendance. [12]The Washington Post Many media houses highlighted the fact that advertisements and hashtags promoting the pro-Trump rally circulated on Facebook and Instagram days beforehand and yet the network failed to put them down. Although, Sandberg amitted the company’s ability to enforce its own rules was “never perfect,” she added, [13]Forbes "I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency.” Thereafter, she was accused of downplaying Facebook’s role in the attack and deflecting the blame onto its competitors. Pressuring the Daily Mail to Drop Stories About her boyfriend CEO Bobby Kotick A report published by The Wall Street Journal on April 21, 2022, claimed that Sandberg tried to persuade the Daily Mail to drop controversial stories about Bobby Kotick in 2016 and 2019, who was Sandberg's boyfriend back then. Apparently, the Daily Mail was about revealed the existence of a temporary restraining order against Kotick that had been obtained by his former girlfriend in 2014. Kotick had reportedly told associates that Sandberg threatened the Daily Mail by warning them that if any article was published against Kotick it will destroy Daily Mail's relationship with Facebook. [14]The Wall Street Journal The article also stated that Sandberg was under review at Meta for allegedly violating the company’s rules by pulling resources from Meta to quash stories about her boyfriend.[15]The Guardian Using Corporate Resources For Her Personal Project In June 2022, The Wall Street Journal alleged Sheryl Sandberg was under investigation at Meta for using compnay resources for her personal projects including writing her second book around 2016-17 and her wedding to Tom Bernthal in 2022. [16]The Wall Street Journal
Relationships & More
Sexual Orientation	Straight
Marital Status	Married
Affairs/Boyfriends	• Dave Goldberg (2002-2004) • Bobby Kotick (CEO of Activision Blizzard) (2016-2019) • Tom Bernthal (2019-2022)
Family
Husband/Spouse	• Brian Kraff (businessman) (1993-1994) • Dave Goldberg (deceased; founder of LAUNCH Media and the CEO of SurveyMonkey) (2004-2015) • Tom Bernthal (co-founder and CEO of Kelton Global and former NBC News producer) (2022-Present) Note: On May 1, 2015, Dave Goldberg died due to an arrhythmia caused by undiagnosed coronary artery disease while he was on a vacation with Sheryl Sandberg in Punta Mita, Mexico.
Children	Sheryl has five children. She has a son (born in 2005) and a daughter (born in 2007) from her marriage to Dave Goldberg. In 2022, Sheryl got married to Tom Bernthal who has three children from his ex-wife Leah Bernthal.
Parents	Father- Joel Sandberg (ophthalmologist) Mother- Adele Sandberg (teacher) Note: Earlier, Adele Sandberg worked as a French teacher, but she left her job to raise her family. Later, she started teaching English as a second language an EF International Language School in Miami Beach.
Siblings	Brother- David Sandberg (pediatric neurosurgeon) Sister- Michelle Sandberg (pediatrician) Note: Sheryl Sandberg is eldest of three siblings.
Money Factor
Net Worth (approx.)	$1.5 billion (as per Forbes her real-time net worth in 2022) [17]Forbes

Some Lesser Known Facts About Sheryl Sandberg

• Sheryl Sandberg is an American business executive and philanthropist. One of the most prominent female executives in the tech industry, Sandberg is known for holding the position of  Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Meta (formerly known as Facebook) from 2008 to 2022. In 2012, Sandberg became the first woman to get elected to the board of directors at Facebook. Previously, Sandberg worked as the Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. Sandberg worked as the Chief of Staff for United States Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers at the beginning of her career.

• When Sheryl was 2, her parents moved from Washington, D.C. to North Miami Beach, Florida.
  

  Childhood picture of Sheryl Sandberg

• Sheryl spent her childhood attending rallies with her activist parents, Joel and Adele, who were actively involved in helping Jews leave the Soviet Union. She grew up in a household that her parents turned into a safe haven for Soviet Jews looking to escape anti-Semitism. Joel and Adele also lent a helping hand to creating the South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry. The Sandberg family was also actively involved with Temple Sinai’s advocacy for the freeing of Soviet Jews.
  

  Sheryl Sandberg’s parents, Joel Sandberg and Adele Sandberg, actively setting up South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry

  In 1982, when Sheryl was 13, she was featured in an article about Soviet Jews by Miami Herald. In the article, she shared that she attended her first rally when she was one year old and had been participating in protest marches, handing out petitions, and working on letter-writing campaigns to help advance their cause ever since.

  

  A childhood picture of Sheryl Sandberg with her parents and siblings

• In 1987, Sheryl graduated from North Miami Beach Senior High School; she was ninth in her class with a 4.646 GPA.
  

  A picture of Sheryl Sandberg graduating from North Miami Senior High in 1987

• At Harvard, she founded an initiative called ‘Women in Economics and Government,’ a group created to encourage more women to major in government and economics. There, she caught the attention of her professor Lawrence Summers in a class on public sector economics.

• In 1991, she graduated with summa cum laude, the highest distinction from Harvard, and Phi Beta Kappa, an academic honor.
• After her first year at Harvard Business School, she won a fellowship.

• She wrote her undergraduate thesis on “How economic inequalities contributed to spousal abuse” while Lawrence Summers was her thesis advisor.

• When Summers was appointed as Chief Economist at the World Bank in 1991, he recruited Sandberg as a research assistant.

• While at the World Bank, Sheryl had the opportunity to work on health projects in India—majorly leprosy, AIDS, and blindness. Spending time in India’s most remote and poorest regions prompted her to go back to Harvard to study for a law degree. However, she later changed it to a business degree.

• She received an MBA with the highest distinction from Harvard Business School in 1995.

• Thereafter, she spent a year working for the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles.

• In 1996, she returned to Washington, D.C to work for Summers, who was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin in 1995.

• In 1999, Summers succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury and Sheryl assumed the position of Chief of Staff at the United States Department of the Treasury.
  

  Sheryl Sandberg with Treasury Secretary Larry Summers

• In 2001, she began her career in the tech business in Silicon Valley when she joined Google as a business-unit general manager. At that time, Google was a private company, barely three years old, with no steady revenue stream. In this capacity, she was responsible for sales operations for the company’s consumer products and Google Book Search. During her seven-year-long career at Google, she supervised the operations for AdWords and AdSense which were instrumental in growing Google’s advertising revenue to billions of dollars. She resigned as Vice President of Online Sales and Operations at Google in March 2008.

• She was also instrumental in launching Google.org, the search giant’s philanthropic arm.

• Although Sheryl and Dave first met in 1996 in Los Angeles, they started dating in 2002. At that time, Dave was working at Yahoo in Los Angeles and Sheryl was working as an advertising executive at Google in the Bay Area.

• In an interview, Goldberg revealed that they flipped a coin to choose where they were going to live, Los Angeles or Bay Area. As Goldberg lost the coin flip, he relocated to Bay Area and commute from there to L.A.

• In 2001, she made acquaintance with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, at a Christmas party hosted by American business executive Dan Rosensweig.

• In March 2008, when she joined Facebook as Chief Operating Officer, it was a start-up of 130 employees. To assist the company in scaling its operations and expanding its global presence, Sheryl adopted an advertising strategy and made Facebook profitable, similar to what she had done at Google. Her efforts were successful in earning the company a revenue of $3.7 billion in 2010, a stark contrast to its $56 million dollar loss in 2008, the year she first joined. In 2012, she became the first woman to join Facebook’s board of directors. As COO, Sandberg positioned Facebook as a platform for small business advertising, helping increase ad revenue by 37% during 2021, to nearly $115 billion.
  

  Mark Zuckerberg (centre) and Sheryl Sandberg (left) applauding after remotely ringing the opening bell for trading at the Nasdaq

• In 2009, Sandberg joined the Board of Directors of The Walt Disney Company. Apart from that, she is named to the boards of Women for Women International, the Center for Global Development, V-Day, Brookings Institution, and Ad Council.

• In 2010, Sheryl spoke at a TEDWomen event in Washington, D.C. In her presentation titled “Why We Have So Few Women Leaders,” she discussed why a smaller percentage of women than men reach the top of their professions. One of the most popular TEDWomen talks, the video has garnered over 11 million views.

• She is the founder of the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, a California-based private 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit organization that works through three key initiatives, Lean In, Option B, and the Dave Goldberg Scholarship Program.

• In 2013, she authored the book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. In the same year, Lean In was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and Thinkers50 Best Book Award.
  

  Lean In Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013)

• Sheryl joined The Giving Pledge in 2014. The campaign encourages extremely wealthy people to contribute a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes.

• Sheryl is also the co-author of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (2017), which she wrote with Wharton professor Adam Grant.

• The success of her books led her to establish nonprofit organizations of the same name. While LeanIn.Org (Lean In Foundation) focuses on helping women advance and succeed in their professional lives by pursuing equal pay initiatives, mentorship, and sexual harassment support. OptionB.org focuses on supporting people who face adversity, whether it’s grief and loss, incarceration, and divorce.

• Lean In Foundation launched various popular campaigns like #BanBossy and #LeanInTogether. A self-censorship campaign, #BanBossy criticized the use of the word “bossy” to represent assertive women in the workplace, proposing that the word is stigmatizing and may discourage girls and women from seeking positions of leadership.

• She was included in the Time 100, an annual listicle of the 100 most influential people in the world, in 2012. Sheryl Sandberg was named among Time magazine’s most influential women of 2013. She was also listed on Forbes Magazine’s 2021 billionaires list for having a net worth of $1.7 billion. Between 2007 and 2018, she was multiple times ranked among the 50 “Most Powerful Women in Business” by Fortune Magazine. She was also named in the list of 50 “Women to Watch” by The Wall Street Journal in 2007 at rank 19 and in 2008 at rank 21.

• In honor of her parents, Sheryl donated $5 million to United Hatzalah in 2019 at a Miami fundraiser. United Hatzalah is an Israeli free, volunteer-based emergency medical services organization throughout Israel with its headquarters based in Jerusalem. The money was directed toward United Hatzalah’s women’s unit in Israel, which was later named the Adele and Dr. Joel Sandberg Women’s Unit.
  

  Sheryl Sandberg (second from right) poses with members of United Hatzalah’s women’s unit in Jerusalem (2019)

• On June 1, 2022, Sandberg announced her resignation from the position of Meta’s COO via a Facebook post, saying that she wanted to focus on her philanthropic work and parenting her five children with Bernthal.

• American author Shoshana Zuboff called Sandberg “the Typhoid Mary of surveillance capitalism” in her 2019 book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.” Zuboff made the remark by citing Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica Scandals, saying that the company earned profit off the collection of data from social media users’ online behavior, preferences, shared data, and relationships.