Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Facebook is an elite product, born in an elite college, fronted by elite Harvard grads who show up for other elite Harvard grads, who are ...

We’re almost finished with the team photos when I feel Joel staring at me. I’m standing with some of the women in our team. Joel calls out, “Sarah Wynn-Williams is looking sultry tonight.” I freeze. I’m not. In fact, it’s hard for me to think of a time in my life when I’ve looked less sultry. I’m vampirish from sleep deprivation. Up at all hours doing calls with Asia, plus a one- and three-year-old at home who don’t like sleeping. Work life and home life are punishing. I haven’t lost the weight from the second pregnancy. I’m dressed like a nun and devoid of makeup to avoid any unwanted attention from my boss. But I guess that’s not the point. This is as much about power as anything else. In fact, Sheryl later posts, The 1992 presidential race was once summed up in a pointed phrase: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Today, as headlines are dominated by stories about sexual harassment and sexual assault at work, a similar phrase comes to mind: “It’s the power, stupid.” And in this situation, I have none. I try to get as far from him as I can, and head to the middle of the dance floor. The white, libertarian Ayn Rand fanboys and Republican politics guys from the policy team are taking turns onstage with embarrassing stilted karaoke renditions of the raps from Hamilton. One of the senior women in our team comes over. “Did you hear Joel call you sultry?” she says, looking concerned. “Yeah, I’m trying to just ignore it,” I tell her, but it’s a relief to know that others can see what’s...

Then she drifts away to another part of the dance floor. Then Joel comes over, beer in hand, doing some pretty embarrassing dad dancing. It doesn’t take very long before he’s behind me, grinding into me.

Friends who have fallen for Sheryl’s Lean In schtick earnestly recommend going to her with my concerns. I get where they’re coming from—this is an issue she’s chosen to take a high profile on. Around this time she is quoted in a Bloomberg article recommending a zero tolerance policy to harassment and saying, “I think it’s great when people lose their jobs when it happens, because I think that is what will get people to not do it in the future. And I think it’s a leadership challenge. As a leader of a company, there needs to be no tolerance for it.

People respond to what is tolerated and what is encouraged.” But having witnessed how she treats her own staff—not to mention her intimate relationship history with Joel, a relationship where he often

stays at her house when he visits the Valley—and how often her actions differ from her words...

regular recruiting updates I’ve sent him, and I realize what a farce this is. The fix is in. The investigation rolls out as badly as you could imagine. Very quickly it seems to switch from an investigation of Joel, or the facts, to an investigation of me. For example, the “sultry” comment. People who were there confirm he said it. But then the investigator tells me in an accusatory way that Joel was looking at a photo of me when he said it. As if that would make the comment okay rather than weirder, and I was somehow at fault for not knowing or disclosing this fact.

Not long after receiving the investigation report, I have my regularly scheduled six-month performance review. This one’s with Elliot, not Joel like usual, and then I realize Heidi is joining it. For a minute it doesn’t compute. Then I realize why the company’s chief employment lawyer is sitting there for my “performance review.” It’s less of a savage attack on my career and more of a quick euthanasia. Elliot and Heidi fire me in a perfunctory manner moments into the meeting. Elliot doesn’t even look sheepish. My laptop is confiscated. I’m not allowed back to my desk to retrieve the personal items that had built up over the years at the company. I ask about a reference.

I’m told that’s a question for my manager. Joel. I ask to say goodbye to my team and

beloved assistant and I’m told no. Instead, I’m walked out of the buildin...

So that’s how it ended for me at Facebook. I faced the behavior so many women at Facebook and other tech firms have faced. I wasn’t silent enough. But if they hadn’t thrown me out, I wouldn’t have lasted much longer at the company anyway. I had told myself I could do more on the inside than the outside, but realistically, being the grit in the machine wasn’t working.

The more they see of the consequences of their actions, the less of a fuck Mark and Facebook’s leadership give. Instead of fixing these things, this ongoing suffering they caused, they seem indifferent. They’re happy to get richer and they just don’t care. It feels crude to put it that way, but it’s true. They profit from the callous and odious things they do.

Joel’s still at Facebook, now Meta. Promoted and even more powerful. Central to core decisions like what to allow on Facebook in the lead-up to the January 6 riots or how Facebook should engage in the efforts to engineer a ban of emerging rival TikTok. Running the largest lobbying effort by a public company in the US. Mark’s chief consigliere in Washington, DC.

Sheryl’s gone too. For someone who built her profile leaning into her career, it’s not clear what her next career step is or why she left. There were reports that in the months before her departure in June 2022, she was facing “internal scrutiny” for multiple things including her use of corporate resources for personal projects such as her Lean In foundation and Facebook employees’ work writing and promoting her book. The Wall Street Journal characterized it as a “broader review of Ms Sandberg’s personal use of Facebook’s resources over many years.”

The allegations under investigation also reportedly included Sheryl using Facebook resources to kill a story about her then boyfriend Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, which would have surfaced allegations of harassment (which Kotick had always denied) and a temporary restraining order (lifted shortly after it was made). Sheryl is now campaigning against the silence around sexual assault following the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel.

As for me … Another baby. I know. The medical professionals were aghast. Telling me “there’s no literature,” which wasn’t actually a sign to write this book as I initially thought, but a way of letting me know that there is no medical research on how to approach birth after an amniotic embolism. Or as one doctor bluntly put it, “Everyone who has what you had is dead, and if they’re not dead, there’s no way they’re having another baby.”

Some AI experts in the West see a closed model as critical. They believe that an open model like Facebook’s will allow China to overtake US dominance in AI. Sam Altman says, “China will force U.S. companies and those of other nations to share user data, utilize AI to develop new ways of spying on their own citizens or create next-generation cyberweapons to use against other countries.” Mark disagrees: “Some people argue that we must close our models to prevent China

from gaining access to them, but my view is that this will not work and will only disadvantage the US and its allies. Our adversaries are great at espionage, stealing models that fit on a thumb drive is relatively easy, and ‘most tech companies are far from operating in a way that would make this more difficult.’”

To work out the safe way forward, we need to understand the relationship that Facebook actually has with China, its second-largest source of revenue behind the US. To have an honest and open accounting o...