Sheryl Sandberg
Source of wealth: Facebook
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Modules
Biography
Sheryl Sandberg served as chief operating officer of Facebook, now Meta, from 2008 until the fall of 2022.
She stepped down from Meta's board in 2024.
Sandberg and her husband, Tom Bernthal, launched Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners in 2021 to invest their own capital in startups.
Sandberg is the author of the bestselling books "Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead" and "Lean In for Graduates."
The Harvard MBA was previously an economist at the World Bank and chief of staff to then U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Sheryl Sandberg
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Sheryl Sandberg, linked to Technology and 'Facebook', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 17 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 1.1 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.