On Thursday, The New York Times published a lengthy story about the rise in power of Stephen Miller, a longtime loyalist of Donald Trump known for his hardline views on immigration. Normally, a story like that wouldn’t get much attention in the tech press. But the piece opened with an anecdote about Mark Zuckerberg that immediately raised eyebrows.
The story detailed a recent meeting Miller had with Zuckerberg when the Meta CEO traveled to Mar-a-Lago last year. According to The Times, Zuckerberg — who would soon renounce Meta’s prior fact checking efforts and ditch corporate diversity programs — “blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for an inclusivity initiative at Facebook that encouraged employees’ self-expression in the workplace.”
That line set off a fresh round of speculation (and some outrage) in tech circles. Sandberg, who left Meta in 2022 and rose to fame after authoring her women in the workplace manifesto Lean In, was known for her once close partnership with Zuckerberg at the top of Facebook. That Zuckerberg would blame his former top lieutenant for fostering “inclusivity” at his company, raised eyebrows even among longtime observers of the company.
“She always knew who Mark Zuckerberg and covered for him,” New York Times reporter Sheera Frankel, who co-wrote a book about Facebook’s dominance, observed on Bluesky. “ The question is whether she will continue to do so when he so blatantly throws her under the (Trump) bus.” Journalist and longtime tech pundit Kara Swisher likewise noted that “folks I talked to tonight from the Mark/Sheryl Facebook era are shocked but not surprised by his blaming her.”
I also weighed in on my Threads account, sharing a link to a Business Insider story from February that quoted an interview in which Zuckerberg said that Sandberg had raised him “like a parent.” I joked that the comment hadn’t aged well.
But on Friday, Zuckerberg decided to let me (and I guess everyone else) know that he and Sandberg are still cool, after all. “Sheryl did amazing work at Meta and will forever be a legend in the industry,” he wrote in a reply to my post. “She built one of the greatest businesses of all time and taught me much of what I know.”
A few minutes later, Sandberg jumped in to helpfully let me know there are no hard feelings on her side, either. “Thank you, @zuck. I will always be grateful for the many years we spent building a great business together – and for your friendship that got me through some of the hardest times of my life and continues to this day.”
Zuckerberg responded with a single heart emoji.
I asked Zuckerberg if he felt Sandberg was too focused on DEI initiatives at Meta, or whether she took away from the “masculine energy” he recently told Joe Rogan corporations should embody. Notably, he has not denied The Times’ reporting about his comments regarding Sandberg, though he claimed they are being misconstrued.
“I answered a question about where the phrase ‘bring your whole self to work’ came from, and now there’s a whole bogus narrative saying I blamed Sheryl for a bunch of stuff that I never did and never will,” he said. (Bringing your “whole self” to work is a slogan popularized by Sandberg in Lean In. Similar language often appeared on Meta’s careers site when the company highlighted diversity among its employees. “Being your authentic self is the foundation of who we are as a company,” Meta wrote on a since-deleted page of its corporate website where it shared its internal diversity reports.)
So, I guess that settles it. Nothing to see here, folks. Mark and Sheryl are definitely still friends. They may not work at the same company anymore, but they are still able to come together to head off a potential PR crisis. What could be more inspiring than that?
Update, January 17, 2025, 4PM PT: This post was updated to reflect an additional comment from Zuckerberg.
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