Sheryl Sandberg Net Worth 2024: The Adult at Facebook’s $2 Billion Fortune

Sheryl Sandberg is one of the most powerful women in the global tech sector.

As the former chief operating officer at Meta – parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more – she was integral to the growth of one of the biggest tech companies, making it a billion-dollar behemoth.

This skyrocketed her personal wealth and in 2024, Sheryl Sandberg’s net worth is estimated at over $2 billion.

The American technology executive is most famed for her role at Facebook, but this is not her only major accomplishment. She’s worked for major businesses such as Google, is the founder of her own company, and is a bestselling author.

To learn more about her life and net worth, keep reading.

Sheryl Sandberg’s Net Worth: Full Breakdown

Over the years, Sheryl Sandberg has accumulated a massive stake in Facebook, with a substantial portion of her restricted stock having been fully vested already.

Nevertheless, she has recently divested a substantial portion of her stock for an undisclosed amount.

Additionally, certain facets of her earnings, such as compensation from board positions in other companies or her tenure at Google, as well as book earnings, remain undisclosed to the public.

Our thorough investigation into her current stock holdings at Meta, coupled with publicly available information regarding her earnings over time, has allowed us to estimate her net worth and give you a breakdown:

5 Quick Facts About Sheryl Sandberg

• Sandberg’s Meta stock holdings and sales have added over $1.8 billion to her net worth.
• She has served on the boards of companies like Disney and Starbucks.
• Sandberg’s book “Lean In” was a bestseller, promoting women’s leadership.
• She has donated $100 million in Meta stock to her foundation.
• Sandberg’s real estate holdings include a property in Menlo Park worth $11 million.

Latest News & Updates

Sheryl Sandberg, the former COO of Meta (formerly Facebook), has seen her career take several turns. In 2024, she officially stepped down from Meta’s board of directors, completing her departure from the company.

Sandberg’s tenure at Meta is marked by both groundbreaking success and significant controversies, including Facebook’s handling of data privacy issues and election interference. Her influence was instrumental in scaling Facebook’s ad-driven business model, but her role in crisis management during the Cambridge Analytica scandal left a more complicated legacy​.

Additionally, her advocacy for gender equity through her “Lean In” movement has faced mixed reception.

While empowering many women in corporate roles, critics have argued that her message sometimes overlooked the systemic challenges faced by women from less privileged backgrounds. Despite these criticisms, Sandberg’s philanthropic efforts, particularly in women’s empowerment and education, continue to bolster her public image. Her departure from Meta suggests a shift toward focusing more on her foundation and philanthropic ventures.

Early Life and Education

Sheryl Kara Sandberg was born on August 28, 1969, in Washington, DC.

When she was two years old, her family moved to North Miami Beach. Her father, Joel, worked as an ophthalmologist.

Her mother, Adele was teaching college French and studying for her Ph.D., but gave up on this to take care of Sheryl and her two younger siblings, Michelle and David.

The Sandberg family are Jewish and Adele and Joel helped found the South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry.

When the children were young, their home was an unofficial headquarters for Soviet Jews who attempted to escape rampany anti-Semitism and a hotel for people who got the right to emigrate.

In Florida, Sheryl Sandberg attended the North Miami Beach High School.

When she graduated in 1987, she was ranked ninth in her class and was sophomore class president and a member of the National Honor Society. While in high school, she earned some extra cash teaching other students aerobics.

Following this success, in 1987, Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College where she studied for a BA in economics.

In college, she was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and won the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics.

She also co-founded Women in Economics and Government organization while still at Harvard, which her mentor and professor Lawrence Summers promoted. The goal of the organization was to get more women to be educated in economics and government.

After her summa cum laude graduation in 1991, Sandberg was recruited by her former professor Summers as his research assistant at the World Bank, where she remained for around one year working on health projects in India.

Her academic journey didn’t end here, though. Two years after her BA graduation, she enrolled at Harvard Business School to study for her MBA. She earned a fellowship in her first year at the school and graduated with the highest distinction.

Personal Life

Sandberg has been married three times.

Her first marriage was to Brian Kraff, whom she divorced in 1994. Her second marriage was to Dave Goldberg, the former CEO of SurveyMonkey.

Goldberg tragically died in 2015, after which Sandberg married Tom Bernthal, the Kelton Global CEO.

She currently lives in California with her husband and five children, two of whom are from her marriage to Goldberg, and three are from Bernthal’s previous marriage.

Sheryl Sandberg Net Worth: From Google to Facebook’s COO

After she earned her degree from Harvard, Sheryl Sandberg immediately jumped into the business world.

Her experience with managing her organization at college, as well as her role as a research assistant, helped her expand her experience and land solid roles.

This eventually led to her being pivotal in the US Treasury in the Clinton administration, before going on to being employed by Google and Meta Platforms.

She initially worked for Summers at the World Bank for about two years before she enrolled at Harvard for her MBA.

Early Career

The first job Sandberg landed after obtaining her MBA was as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company.

She remained there for approximately one year before she became Chief of Staff for Lawrence Summers, the US Secretary of the Treasury and her former mentor from her college days.

Summers became the Deputy Treasury Secretary under Robert Rubin in the Clinton administration in 1995 and invited Sandberg to be his chief of staff. She accepted the role and worked as his chief of staff from 1996 until 2001.

Working at Google

When the Democrats lost the election in 2000, Sandberg decided to move to Silicon Valley, where she took a job at Google, becoming their business unit general manager a year later.

In this role, she was responsible for Google’s advertising and publishing products, online sales, and Google Book Search.

When Google reached out to offer her a job, it was a small company and didn’t have consistent revenue, but Sandberg recognized its potential.

During her time at the company, she played a key role in growing the ad and sales team, which increased from 4 people to 4,000.

Google kept growing at a whirlwind pace during Sandberg’s time there, and they eventually promoted her to vice president for global online sales and operations.

However, having spent seven years at the company, Sheryl Sandberg was ready for a change – and a new challenge.

At about this time, she met Mark Zuckerberg and eventually accepted a job at Facebook.

Meeting Zuckerberg and Leaving Google

In 2007, Sandberg met Mark Zuckerberg at a Christmas party held by Dan Rosenzweig.

Facebook was growing fast and he needed some help running it, so when he met Sandberg, the successful vice president for global sales at Google, he went up and introduced himself.

Even though there was no formal search for a chief operating officer role at Facebook, he immediately thought that Sandberg was a perfect fit for the gig.

The offer didn’t come immediately, though. After the holidays, Zuckerberg emailed her and they started having dinners. For six weeks, they met for dinner once or twice a week discussing the position.

She would often have to ask Zuckerberg to leave as midnight rolled around during these intense initial conversations.

At around the same time, Sandberg talked with Eric Schmidt, the then-CEO of Google, about her desire to become the chief financial officer, but he rejected her request.

She asked about becoming Google’s chief operating officer, but Schmidt and the two founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided not to promote her.

Fast forward to March 2008, and Facebook (now Meta Platforms) announced that it had hired Sheryl Sandberg as the COO of the company. She would go on to be referred to as “the adult in the room” at Facebook, being 15 years Zuckerberg’s senior.

Sandberg’s Work at Meta Platforms

After joining Meta Platforms, Sandberg instantly tried to make connections with people and find a way to make the social media business more profitable.

As Zuckerberg’s right hand at Meta Platforms, she oversaw pretty much everything about the company’s business operations including business development, public policy, communications, sales, and marketing.

By 2012, everyone knew of her success and communication skills and she became the eighth member and the first woman to join Facebook’s board of directors.

While putting her in such a high position proved to be incredibly lucrative for Meta Platforms, Sandberg’s time at Meta Platforms was associated with controversies, as well.

In 2018, The New York Times published a report detailing the COO’s role in handling the company’s public relations after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections.

She was also called to testify in front of Congress, along with Jack Dorsey, about foreign interests using social media in the election.

That same year, The New York Times also reported that she had asked the company’s communications staff to research George Soros’ finances after he publicly criticized the company at the World Economic Forum.

Leaving Meta Platforms

On June 1, 2022, Sheryl Sandberg announced that she would be leaving Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) as a chief operating officer in the fall of that same year, but would remain on the board of directors, stating that “it is time for me to write the next chapter of her life”.

She wrote a long Facebook post sharing her beginnings and experiences at the company.

In the Facebook post, Sandberg wrote that she didn’t expect to stay at the company for so long, but she served for 14 years, and that now she planned to focus on her foundation Lean In instead.

Two years later, in 2024, Sheryl Sandberg also announced that she would be leaving the board of directors of Meta Platforms i.e. not standing for re-election in May.

Meta Platforms Stock and Earnings at Facebook

In April 2014, it was reported that Sheryl Sandberg had sold more than half of her Meta Platforms shares since Facebook’s IPO. At the time of the IPO, she had 41 million shares in the company.

Since then, she has reportedly reduced her share count to 17.2 million or a 0.5% stake in the company, which is worth around $1 billion.

In total, she has sold over $1.8 billion worth of stock holdings in the years after the company went public according to public filings.

At the time of the IPO, Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, gained $821 million in net worth from the shares that vested in 2012, as well as another $25.6 million in stock.

As the chief operating officer of Meta Platforms Inc., she earned $27,144,100 on average.

This would amount to nearly $380 million during her 14-year tenure at the company, though a large portion of her compensation probably came in the form of Meta stock, so it’s hard to pinpoint how much of it came in cash and bonuses.

Honors and Awards

As the long-term COO of Meta Platforms and a major philanthropist, Sheryl Sandberg has accumulated a long list of awards and honors over the years, including:

• Awarded the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics at Harvard
• Ranked one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business by Fortune Magazine in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018
• Ranked one of the 50 Women to Watch by The Wall Street Journal in 2007 and 2008
• Named one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web by Business Week in 2009
• Named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time in 2012
• Ranked third in the Evangelists category of the Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s first Digital Power Index of the 100 most significant people in the online world in 2012
• Lean In was shortlisted for the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2013
• Featured on The World’s 50 Most Influential Jews list by Jerusalem Post in 2013
• Named one of the world’s 100 most powerful women by Forbes in 2014, 2017, and 2021

Philanthropic Work

In November 2016, Sheryl Sandberg renamed her existing Lean In Foundation to the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, honoring her late husband.

It has since been renamed again to the Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation

The foundation is an umbrella for Leanin.org, as well as the new organization created around her second book Option B.

Among the major donations, Sandberg transferred $100 million in Meta stock to fund charitable endeavors through her foundation.

When she stepped down as the chief operating officer of Meta, Sandberg shared that she planned to refocus her work on women’s issues at the time Roe v Wade was toppled.

“This is a really important moment for women. This is a really important moment for me to be able to do more with my philanthropy, with my foundation” – she shared.

Sheryl Sandberg Net Worth: Other Assets and Ventures

For the most part, Sandberg’s success and net worth derive from her time as the chief operating officer at Meta Platforms.

However, she has been named to other boards in addition to Meta Platforms and has stock in at least one other company.

On top of this, she earns money from her books and has significant assets in real estate.

Board Memberships

In 2009, The Walt Disney Company named Sandberg to their board of directors. She has also previously been a board member of:

• Starbucks
• Ad Council
• Brookings Institution
• Women for Women International
• Center for Global Development
• V-Day

She was a board member at Starbucks between 2009 and 2012 but stepped down to focus on Facebook’s IPO. Reportedly, she still has 10,910 shares of Starbucks Corp worth over $995,592 today.

Books

Sheryl Sandberg has released two books to date, including:

• Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead in 2013 – a bestseller that sold millions of copies and inspired her to found the Lean In Foundation that same year
• Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, co-authored with Adam Grant in 2017, was inspired by the grief she experienced after the death of her husband, also a bestseller

In addition to her books, Sandberg has published several journalistic pieces and has done TED talks. In 2008, for instance, before her chief operating officer role at Meta, she wrote an article for the Huffington Post to support her mentor Larry Summers.

The Ban Bossy Campaign

In 2014, Sandberg and Lean In, her foundation, sponsored a TV and social media campaign titled Ban Bossy, designed to discourage the word bossy from general use because of its effect on young girls.

Some of the stars supporting her campaign included Beyoncé, Condoleezza Rice, and Jenifer Garner.

Public Speaking

Sheryl Sandberg is an accomplished public speaker and has delivered several commencement addresses at different universities over the years.

Her public speaking appearances include:

• Keynote speaker at the Business Leadership Council at the Jewish Community Federation in 2010
• TEDtalk: “Why we have too few women leaders” in 2010
• Commencement address at the Barnard College graduation ceremony in 2011
• Keynote speaker at the Class Day ceremony at Harvard in 2012
• Keynote speaker at the Colgate University’s annual Entrepreneur Weekend in 2013
• Commencement address at the University of California graduation ceremony in 2016
• Commencement address to Virginia Tech’s Class of 2017
• Commencement address for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018

Business Ventures

Sandberg and her husband Tom Bernthal started an investment company at the end of 2023 named Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. They also used this fund to invest in health AI startup Cercle.

Real Estate

Back in 2009, Sandberg bought a property in Menlo Park, California, spending $2.9 million. She and her husband demolished the existing property and started building from scratch.

The property is most likely still under her ownership and is worth around $11 million.

In 2014, Sandberg sold her home in Atherton, California for $9.25 million, which she bought in 2004 for nearly $8 million.

What Can We Learn from Sheryl Sandberg’s Story?

Sheryl Sandberg’s journey from her early career days to her role as a tech executive and philanthropist at Meta Platforms offers insights into leadership, resilience, and navigating challenges in the very dynamic technology industry.

As the former chief operating officer of Meta Platforms, Sandberg played a key role in shaping the company’s trajectory, overseeing many facets of its operations and contributing to its success.

Her tenure at Meta Platforms exemplifies the importance of effective leadership, especially when it comes to steering a tech giant such as Facebook through turbulent waters and a mix of competitors.

Throughout her career, Sandberg demonstrated a remarkable ability to respond to changing demands, embrace new challenges, and lead her team.

From the moment she joined Google to her tenure as the Meta COO, she has consistently thrived in leadership roles, leveraging her strategic acumen to drive success.

Furthermore, Sandberg’s commitment to philanthropic work and social impact highlights the potential of leadership beyond the boardroom.

Through initiatives like her foundation and Leanin.org, she has championed causes aimed at fostering diversity, building more inclusive communities, and fixing women’s issues in the world.

As a trailblazing tech executive, she has shattered many barriers and paved the way for women in male-dominated industries, promoting a future of a more equal world.