Who is the new CEO of Facebook?

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced that Javier Olivan will replace Sheryl Sandberg as Facebook’s COO. Mr. Olivan plays an important but secretive role, contributing to the explosive growth of the social network over the past 15 years.

On June 2, Ms. Sandberg shared that she would step down as COO at the end of this year to write a “new chapter” in her life and focus on philanthropic activities. She made the decision as Meta grapples with slow growth and rising costs. The company is transforming itself from a social network into a virtual universe.

Mr. Olivan was born and raised in Spain, holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial and electrical engineering from the University of Navarra, and a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University. Before joining Facebook at the end of 2007 as the Director of International Growth, he worked at NTT (Japan) and Siemens. At that time, Facebook was still young with about 40 million daily users. To date, this “empire” has attracted nearly 3.6 billion users on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp…

While overseeing international operations, Olivan also pushed Facebook’s expansion plans in countries like India, Japan, Russia, Indonesia and Brazil. Critics have criticized the company for pursuing growth without effectively countering the spread of disinformation, hate speech or malicious content in developing markets.

In 2021, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen revealed internal documents showing that Facebook put profit above user safety, lacked the right tools to remove harmful content in other languages must be English.

As Chief Growth Officer, Mr. Olivan’s primary duties are to manage features and functionality across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. As for his new position, COO, he will continue to lead business and infrastructure development. However, according to CEO Zuckerberg, the job has both advertising and business products.

According to Reuters, roles have changed, but one thing is likely to remain: Mr. Olivan will still stay behind, in contrast to Ms. Sandberg, who has appeared before Congress, wrote books about women and set an example. familiar face of Facebook to the public.

On his personal page, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote: “This role will be different from what Ms. Sheryl has done. It will be a more traditional COO role, where Javi focuses on operations and internals.”

Meta is already a mature business with $118 billion in revenue, so Olivan may have less autonomy than Sandberg in the chair, according to Brian Wieser, President of Business Information at the advertising agency. Report GroupM. The question is whether the new COO is more concerned with issues such as privacy as well as protecting brands from having their ads appear next to inappropriate content.