Crypto traders turn against each other in a collapsing market

Olga Kharif, Bloomberg News

With crypto prices tumbling precipitously, traders have begun increasingly turning against one another to eke out ever-elusive profits.

Many shark traders scour blockchains -- digital ledgers for recording transactions -- seeking information on other traders, particularly those with highly leveraged positions, an anonymous user known as Omakase, a contributor to the Sushi decentralized exchange, said in an interview. 

The sharks then attack the positions by trying to push them into liquidation, and earning liquidation bonuses that are common in decentralized finance (DeFi), where people trade, lend and borrow from each other without intermediaries like banks.

Related strategies may have contributed to the collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin, with shark traders making money off price arbitrage between the Curve decentralized exchange and centralized exchanges, according to Nansen, a blockchain analytics firm. 

Recent troubles at crypto lender Celsius Network were exacerbated by arbitragers as well. The price of stETh token that Celsius has a large position in started trading at a large discount from Ether, to which it’s tied. 

“As stETH goes down, arbitragers buy stETH and short ETH against it, sending ETH lower, which again lowers collateral values across DeFi,” effectively worsening Celsius’s position, according to a recent Arca note.

As Omakase put it, “In a downtrend environment, where yields are harder to access, what we are going to see is some actors utilize some more aggressive strategies, and that may not be necessarily good for the community.”  

“The environment has become more player vs player,” Omakase added.

With crypto prices under pressure, taking on leverage has presented an even greater peril. Last year, Sushi launched a margin-trading and lending platform. Most crypto exchanges offer margin trading, and in the past it has been as high as 100X, meaning that people were able to borrow 100 times what they put down as collateral. 

Most DeFi apps require traders to overcollateralize, however -- effectively taking out less in loans than they put in.

DRIVING DOWN THE PRICE

A trader may find out that others could get liquidated when a coin’s price drops to, say, US$100. The trader could then build up a sufficient position in the coin, then sell in order to pull the price below US$100, while also collecting the reward for liquidating the trader that most DeFi apps offer. 

“Most protocols offer a 10-15 per cent liquidation fee,” Omakase said. “Triggering enough liquidations would cause a liquidation cascade where a motivated actor could simply hold a short position in order to profit for the subsequent secondary decrease.”

Other traders are simply profiting off liquidations they don’t trigger. Nathan Worsley runs a slew of bots -- software programs -- that search for traders who are about to get liquidated and gets paid a commission for liquidating them. 

“Recently the amount of liquidations has been huge,” Worsley said in emails. “However, liquidations is not a continuous strategy, you sometimes go for a week or more without any significant liquidations. However, when liquidations happen there are usually a lot at once. You basically have to work a long time while making US$0 profit, in order to be ready for the big day or two when you might be able to make a million dollars at once.” 

His bots continuously scour blockchains, keeping a list of all the borrowers using a particular app and scrutinizing the health of their accounts. Once positions are ready for liquidation, “it’s usually a battle to be the quickest and perform the liquidation,” Worsley explained. 

“I would push back on classifying this as an ‘attack,’” he added. “The reason is because without liquidations, you can’t have a lending market. So even though no one enjoys being liquidated, it’s essential that people do get liquidated in order to make the market and protect the protocol from insolvency.”

Liquidations can be triggered after traders borrow from apps like Aave or Compound, and put up collateral -- say, in Ether -- that’s typically greater than what they borrow, perhaps 120 per cent of the borrowed funds. If Ether’s price drops, that collateral may now be worth only 110 per cent of what the trader borrowed.

'PROTECT THE PROTOCOL'

“My job as the liquidator is to protect the protocol by closing your position,” Worsley said. “The protocol gives me a reward for being a liquidator to encourage this activity, because blockchains cannot move by themselves. You have borrowed US$1,000 of Bitcoin, so I repay the US$1,000 of Bitcoin you owe the protocol. In return, the protocol gives me US$1000 of your Ethereum collateral, plus a US$100 ‘liquidation bonus’ from your excess collateral. I have made a profit, you have been liquidated and your position is closed, and the protocol itself has been protected from bad debt.”

With liquidation targets becoming more and more tempting in a tumultuous market, Omakase offers this advice: “Generally everyone should stay safe, everyone should avoid the use of leverage.”

Bloomberg Businessweek: Ethereum mining is about to disappear, miners are not happy

CoinYuppie • 2022-06-17 10:23 • Ethereum News

The shift from “Proof of Work” to “Proof of Stake” will drastically reduce power consumption and allow some expensive technology to find new uses.

Mikel-Angelo Chalfoun, an ethereum miner, stores his graphics cards in a warehouse in Dubai.

The Ethereum mining community is a diverse group, both geographically and demographically. A 28-year-old translator in Ukraine runs some computing hardware on his balcony to earn cryptocurrency so he can buy clothes and other necessities. In Argentina, a retiree used her gaming computer to double her monthly pension. A college student in Canada has dug up enough money to buy a BMW motorcycle and a modified 2006 Dodge Charger SRT – and pay for gas every month.

Even many outside the blockchain world know that the collapse of the cryptocurrency market has made the past few months quite painful for anyone whose financial situation is tied to a currency. The price of ethereum is down about 70% this year as of June 15. At the same time, a little-known factor (a tectonic shift known as the Ethereum “merger”) will end Ethereum mining entirely, cutting off the income of as many as 1 million people. “It would be a huge economic blow, almost completely depriving the original miners of a good source of income,” the Ukrainian translator said. (He asked to remain anonymous for fear of being robbed.)

Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two largest cryptocurrency networks by market capitalization, both use a procedure known as “proof of work” to record transactions, in which so-called miners use computer resources to solve difficult mathematical problems, converting transactions Blocks are added to the public ledger. Miners receive payment in cryptocurrency as a reward. Bitcoin mining, which usually involves specialized equipment, has been industrialized; as mining has moved to data centers, the participation of ordinary people has largely been eliminated. But Ethereum mining relies on the kind of graphics card found in a typical gaming computer, and many ordinary people can still do it.

Proof-of-work is just a competition to make a computer work hard, which means it uses a lot of energy. The environmental damage it causes is a major criticism of cryptocurrencies by environmentalists. Since the inception of Ethereum, its developers have been preparing to move to an alternative model known as proof-of-stake. Under this system, people would reserve or “stake” a certain amount of ether, the cryptocurrency of the ethereum blockchain, to win rewards for running software that correctly batches transactions into new blocks and checks The work of other validators. Proof of stake can reduce the power consumption of the Ethereum network by about 99%. It would also put miners out of work, which is a major blow given the capital investment to build the business. According to Bitpro Consulting, ethereum miners have already spent about $15 billion on graphics processing units (GPUs), not including ancillary costs such as wiring and transformers.

Prices of Selected Used Graphics Processing Units for Sale on eBay

Average for the previous week??

The ethereum merger is expected to take place in August, although no official date has been given. It has been pushed back many times, and many miners hope this will happen again. “I don’t think they’ll be able to get it done anytime soon,” said Aydin Kilic, chief operating officer of ethereum industrial miner Hive. But others associated with ethereum see a merger as inevitable. “The odds of not happening this year are very low (from 1% to 10%),” said Tim Becco, a computer scientist who coordinates ethereum developers. What I’d like to avoid is someone buys a GPU for mining today, but merges it in Happening this summer, it will make it almost worthless.”

Despite this, miners are actually expanding their operations. GPU prices have more than halved since the start of the year, leading to a surge in purchases. According to data from tracker Etherscan, Ethereum’s hashrate, a measure of the mining power that powers the network, has nearly doubled in the last year. Even with the current depressed cryptocurrency prices, mining Ethereum is more profitable than backing any other major coin, including Bitcoin. “I guess people are trying to get as much as possible before it’s over,” said Slava Karpenko, chief technology officer at 2Miners. The organization helps small miners pool their resources to support Ethereum. The group’s active user count has climbed 70 percent since November, to about 120,000, he said.

However, recovering costs has become more difficult due to the fall in the price of ether. Mike Lam, a 38-year-old engineer from Ontario who has been mining for a year, only made about $5,000 worth of cryptocurrency on his initial $30,000 investment in hardware; he also paid about $650 each. monthly electricity bill. Aaron Petzold, 24, a recent college student who mines ether at his parents’ house in Wisconsin, said he has four months to recoup his investment of more than $28,000. “I want to keep mining until it’s over,” he said. “It’s a big uncertainty. No one really knows what’s going to happen. There’s a lot of people who think I’m obsessed.”

The ethereum merger will likely settle after August.

Miners don’t get nothing. After the merger, their mining rigs will remain powerful computing devices that can be used elsewhere, and some are planning to mine other coins or find other uses for those rigs. After the merger, Petzold is considering using his device as a piece of hardware for digital video production, primarily responsible for rendering, which requires a lot of computing resources. “There are other uses for these cards,” he said. “You can turn it into a render farm, and you can do different machine learning options. They’re just not going to be as profitable as mining.”

Canadian mining pool operator Flexpool is looking to add more tokens for its members to mine and plans to deploy its developers to program other cryptocurrency projects, said a director who asked not to be named for fear of being robbed: “It’s like a company Typewriter companies. When nobody buys typewriters anymore, so you have to use the capital you make on typewriters to move to other businesses.”

Others, like Ivan Zhang, 35, and Karol Przybytkowski, 36, plan to sell their stable of graphics cards and use their facilities in upstate New York to host other miners’ gear for a fee. But GPU prices are expected to drop further as many ethereum miners are likely to rush to sell immediately after the merger. Bitpro plans to stop buying graphics cards within a few weeks, and its CEO Mark D’Aria said: “My view is that no matter how much we pay today, we’re going to make a lot less after this event. We’re just going to sit there and watch Let that happen and pick up the pieces.”

Some miners hope to do better by moving to mining other GPU-requiring coins like Ethereum Classic or Ravencoin. The more miners flocking to any coin, the harder it will be to make a profit. But cryptocurrency breeds optimists, and miners are building for what their business will be a reason to survive. Mikel-Angelo Chalfoun, 30, pays $9,000 a year for a warehouse in Dubai to house and power his 76 graphics cards. He said he would be able to compete with miners at a higher cost. “No matter how cheap crypto gets, no matter how harsh crypto winter gets, I’m fine, I’ll never mine at a loss,” he said.

Other miners just feel betrayed. Canadian engineer Lin said: “They need miners until they merge! It’s a little weird. Ethereum needs us miners until they deprecate us.” (He runs 50 graphics cards in his basement)

Posted by:CoinYuppie，Reprinted with attribution to:https://coinyuppie.com/bloomberg-businessweek-ethereum-mining-is-about-to-disappear-miners-are-not-happy/
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Fertilizer stockpiles swell as farmers shun high prices, easing harvest worries

Tarso Veloso Ribeiro and Elizabeth Elkin, Bloomberg News

The fertilizer shortage that threw the agricultural sector into disarray and pushed food costs higher globally may be fading.

Crops across the world are dependent on nutrients from Russia, one of the biggest exporters, and the invasion of Ukraine four months ago roiled markets for the crucial chemicals. Ultimately, prices soared so high that farmers halted buying — and now the market has flipped. Fertilizer supplies are piling up from Florida to South America. Ships are waiting to unload and companies are struggling to reduce stocks in ports and warehouses, according to people familiar with the matter. 

In Brazil, warehouses are approaching maximum capacity because farmers are betting prices have farther to fall. As far back as March — just weeks after Russia invaded — North American potash reserves were at a six-year high, according to Bloomberg’s Green Markets and The Fertilizer Institute, as prices soared and farmers skipped applications. 

Meanwhile, concerns that fertilizer supplies from Russia would be completely shut off haven’t panned out. Russian fertilizer sales are exempt from the sanctions imposed by US and EU in response to the war on Ukraine, and some shipments are entering the US, according to cargo data tracked by Bloomberg. A ship carrying 12,000 metric tons of granular urea, a common nitrogen fertilizer, arrived from Russia with a bill of lading dated June 8. While the amount is relatively small, it confirms that the product has found a pathway to American shores.

The US government is even encouraging agricultural and shipping companies to buy and carry more Russian fertilizer.

Wholesale fertilizer prices are declining after soaring to multi-year highs. North American prices are the lowest they’ve been since January and a closely watched index for the continent is down 35 per cent since touching a record in late March, according to Green Markets. Farmers are still awaiting lower prices as grains trend higher, expanding the arbitrage of delayed nutrient purchases.

Green Market’s North American weekly fertilizer price index dropped 4 per cent this week, compounding last week’s 3 per cent decline. Wholesale New Orleans urea fell to the lowest since August, while New Orleans ammonia inched higher by 2 per cent amid rising overseas demand.

The slide in fertilizer prices -- if it continues -- may ease some of the concerns that farmers would skip applications of synthetic nutrients to save money, reducing crop yields and worsening food inflation and hunger in parts of the world. Still, it's too early to tell whether prices will rebound if the war in Ukraine persists into a period when demand is seasonally higher.

“Fertilizer prices softened through the spring season as delayed plantings, ample supply, and near record per-ton prices pushed farmers to pull back on fertilizer applications,” said Alexis Maxwell, an analyst at Green Markets. Fertilizer-to-crop price ratios, a key affordability metric, have sunk, “reflecting a potential buying opportunity for corn farmers who need product today.”

Telus to buy digital-health firm LifeWorks for $2.3B

Derek Decloet and John Lauerman, Bloomberg News

Telus Corp. said it will acquire digital-health provider LifeWorks Inc. for about $2.3 billion (US$1.8 billion), expanding further into health services as it pursues a diversification strategy. 

Telus will pay $33 for each LifeWorks share and is offering the option to take cash or stock or a mix of the two. It’s about an 80 per cent premium to where LifeWorks closed in Toronto on Wednesday. 

Telus was down 3.1 per cent to $28.45, the lowest since November. LifeWorks rose 68.4 per cent to $30.65 as of 9:55 a.m. in Toronto. 

Digital and telehealth services have become an important dimension of health care after the pandemic forced many patient interactions outside of hospitals and clinics. The combination will allow the companies to form a global provider of primary and preventative digital health care and wellness services, according to a statement by the companies. 

Telus has pursued a different strategy from major Canadian rivals BCE Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc., eschewing ownership of media assets and instead expanding in digital services and technology for companies and individuals. 

Last year, the Vancouver-based company took public Telus International CDA Inc., which provides services such as content moderation, IT support, mobile app design and work-from-home technology. It also has separate divisions offering technology and services to the agriculture and health sectors.

“This transaction is financially compelling and strategically attractive to Telus, and a natural complement to Telus Health, significantly accelerating our vision of advancing employer-based health care, increasing access to high quality, proactive healthcare and mental wellness for employees,” Chief Financial Officer Doug French said in a statement.

Toronto-based LifeWorks provides human-resources consulting, outsourcing, mental health services and other services to companies. It has about 7,000 employees and 25,000 clients. The firm was previously known as Morneau Sheppell and was once run by Bill Morneau, who went on to become Canada’s finance minister from 2015 to 2020. 

Telus will also assume existing LifeWorks debt, making the total value of the transaction $2.9 billion. 

What Bloomberg Intelligence Says 

Telus is acquiring employee-benefits provider LifeWorks in a move that may help sustain top-line growth of 4-6 per cent through 2025 by expanding its digital-health business and furthering a push into adjacent, high-growth segments to offset a slowdown in Canada’s wireless industry. The companies’ product portfolios are complementary, which sets up a good cross-selling opportunity, with potential run-rate synergies of $170-$200 million at a $50 million cost to realize, according to Telus. 

-- Bloomberg Intelligence analysts John Butler and Hoa Nguyen

Canada proposes new rules to protect personal information

Randy Thanthong-Knight, Bloomberg News

New legislation to give Canadians more control over their personal information will include the steepest corporate fines among Group of Seven nations, according to the country’s industry ministry.

The proposed Consumer Privacy Protection Act establishes penalties of $25 million (US$19.4 million), or as much as 5 per cent of global revenue, whichever is greater, for companies that breach privacy rules. 

The bill will allow Canadians to move their information from one company to another securely and request that data be deleted. It will also limit the collection and usage of minors’ information, and give the country’s privacy commissioner broad powers to order a company to stop collecting data or using personal information.

Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne and Justice Minister David Lametti introduced the legislation on Thursday as part of the government’s Digital Charter Implementation Act. It comes amid broader calls by several business groups to reform Canada’s privacy law to be more closely aligned with those of key trading partners, including the European Union.

“Without updated privacy legislation, Canadian business finds itself at a disadvantage. The law has not kept up with the pace of change, nor with Canada’s international competitors,” Mark Agnew, senior vice president at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, said by email. “Finalizing and passing this legislation must be a top priority when the fall session begins.”

Earlier this month, Tim Hortons Inc. was found to have violated privacy laws by collecting “vast amounts” of sensitive location data from people who downloaded the restaurant chain’s mobile app.

Champagne and Lametti also tabled the Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act to create a new court to enforce the privacy law, and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act to establish a new AI and data commissioner who will monitor company compliance to ensure technology is used responsibly.

Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic

Michael Smith and Jonathan Franklin. Doubleday, $30 (272p) ISBN 978-0-385-54740-6

A deadly virus stows away aboard the cruise ship Zaandam on its trip around South America in this gripping chronicle of the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Journalists Smith and Franklin (A Wild Idea) recount how nearly 200 passengers and crew members fell sick as the Zaandam remained at sea for 21 days in March 2020. Though Holland America executives were monitoring Covid-19 before the Zaandam set sail on March 8, they believed the 781-foot-long ship was “immune to such threats,” and took almost no precautions. There were no temperature checks upon boarding, no policies regarding masks and social distancing, no test kits, and only two doctors and four nurses to care for the crew and the largely retired and elderly passengers. As the ship’s medical center filled with patients struggling to breathe, the crew—following corporate mandates—continued to promote group activities, causing more people to fall ill. Refused entry by port after port as the world awoke to the dangers of Covid-19, the Zaandam’s passengers and crew members hunkered down in their cabins and were horrified to learn that several of their shipmates died. Extensive firsthand testimony and the authors’ brisk, matter-of-fact style enrich this propulsive account of how a holiday cruise turned into a nightmare. Readers will be riveted and appalled. (June)

Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes & the Sacking of Local Government

Lawrence Tabak. Univ. of Chicago, 

$27.50 trade paper (280p) ISBN 978-0-226-74065-2

Journalist Tabak (In Real Life) offers a stark cautionary tale of the murky practices, questionable economics, and political wheeling and dealing done in the name of economic development and job creation by manufacturing giant Foxconn, the Taiwan-based company that makes “some of the most popular electronics in the world,” including iPhones, Kindles, and PlayStations. In 2017, Donald Trump and Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s governor, announced the company would build a factory there, bringing 13,000 new manufacturing jobs to the state. 

Tabak highlights the costly accommodations necessary for that, powerfully demonstrating how the complex trade-offs that accompany speculative efforts to deliver new jobs can ultimately be just “a desert mirage to a thirst-crazed traveler.” 

He illustrates the human impact of economic development, as homeowners and small business owners risked losing their homes and livelihoods in the name of infrastructure expansion, and details the environmental compromises required to land a major job creator (environmentalists worried the state’s “rash” behavior would be “opening up lake water to aggressive and unregulated expansion”). 

Potentially dry economic concepts are accessible and eye-opening in Tabak’s hands, while the events of small-town board meetings are simultaneously infuriating and page-turning. Tabak’s impressively researched and investigated narrative is as timely as it is gripping. (Nov.)

• Former Goldman Sachs MD Is Publishing a Book Alleging Abuse and Attack

Max Abelson, Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg) -- After Jamie Fiore Higgins was promoted inside Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the veteran she replaced pinned her to the wall of their New York office and lifted her by the jaw. At a work conference, one of her bosses at the bank propositioned her. When she got up from her desk in Goldman’s headquarters to pump milk for her fourth child, a longtime trader mooed at her. 

Those are some of the allegations she makes in a memoir, “Bully Market,” due to be published this August. On Wall Street, it’s unusual to make it into the club of Goldman managing directors, as she did in 2012, and almost unheard of to tell the world what goes on there. 

The book will make Fiore Higgins one of the most senior people to do it -- Greg Smith, who released “Why I Left Goldman Sachs” a decade ago, was a Wall Street deckhand by comparison. 

The biggest US banks, all run by men until Jane Fraser broke Citigroup Inc.’s glass ceiling last year, have said they’re trying to boost gender and racial representation. Goldman named what it called its most diverse class of new managing directors, though the bank is losing senior Black women. It’s also fighting one of the industry’s biggest gender discrimination lawsuits, recently asking a judge to keep the names of two senior executives mentioned in internal complaints hidden from the public. 

“We strongly disagree with Ms. Higgins’ characterization of Goldman Sachs’ culture, and we decline to respond to anonymized allegations,” Maeve DuVally, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs, said in an emailed statement. Fiore Higgins, who left the bank in 2016, declined to comment.

Fiore Higgins changed colleague names, created composites, compressed time and recreated dialogue, she writes in an author’s note in an advance proof. Everything in the book happened to her, it says, and she wrote with the aid of journals, correspondence and conversations with family and friends. 

“‘Bully Market’ is a rare account from inside Goldman Sachs by one of its high-ranking women,” Cat Boyd, a spokesperson for publisher Simon & Schuster, wrote in an email.

The book chronicles “a discriminatory culture that seemed designed to hold back the few women and people of color,” the publisher’s website says. “Despite Goldman Sachs having the right talking points and statistics, Fiore Higgins soon realized that these provided a veneer.”

In the book, the attack is one of the bleakest moments in a career spanning 1998 to 2016. When Fiore Higgins takes over as a team manager from a colleague who was apparently having an affair with a client, she tells him she’s moving him off that account. He wraps his hand under her jaw until she thinks she’ll pass out. A day later, their boss tells her not to report it to human resources. After years go by, she makes a complaint about a different offense to employee relations, thinking it’s anonymous, though that boss somehow finds out and warns her not to take complaints outside the team.

But “Bully Market” also vividly narrates her own moral slide, when the lure of money transformed her from a frightened Wall Street rookie into a veteran who humiliated new recruits and enjoyed watching them squirm. It describes the near-collapse of her marriage, her Xanax use, and the toll taken on bankers who do work they despise.

Though “Bully Market” doesn’t disclose details about her work or clients, she joined as an analyst in 1998, when she graduated with a bachelor’s in mathematics from Bryn Mawr, covered hedge fund clients, co-managed a lending team in 2006 and 2007, and was managing a team inside the securities lending group in 2014, according to an online biography for a recruiting trip to the college in 2014. She’s now a professional coach who helps teens build leadership skills and professionals navigate the workforce, her author biography says.

Fiore Higgins writes in an epilogue that it would be naive to hope the cultural shifts from the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter have made her account outdated. Addressing Goldman executives directly, she asks them to give more independence to human resources, stop middle managers from standing in the way of change, and be as cutthroat about inclusion as profit. 

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

What really triggered the exit of Facebook's feminist queen? 

TOM LEONARD examines how the billionaire public face of the social media giant Sheryl Sandberg quit under clouds of controversy

• Sheryl Sandberg was the social media icon who told women they could have it all
• But as Nick Clegg takes her place, questions about her exit still remain 
• Ms Sandberg had just a day of good press before news broke of a probe

By TOM LEONARD IN NEW YORK FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 14 June 2022 

When Sheryl Sandberg was at the height of her power as Mark Zuckerberg's number two at Facebook, she reportedly hired a PR company who charged $30,000 a month to burnish her public image.

But, following her departure from the social media giant last week after 14 years, insisting she needed to spend more time with her family and work on various philanthropic enterprises, she is in need of their services more than ever.

For Miss Sandberg — whose role as the public face of the social media giant has now been filled by the company's president of global affairs, the former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg — had just a day to bask in progressive virtuousness before it emerged there might be other reasons why she'd left the controversial technology company.

Miss Sandberg (pictured last July with Mark Zuckerberg) became Facebook's valuable face

It turns out that Silicon Valley's feminist queen, who claimed she was leaving principally to help her fellow women fight attempts by a conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court to challenge legal abortion in America, was reportedly under investigation by her ex-employer over her use of company resources.

Within 24 hours of Miss Sandberg's rather pious announcement, the Wall Street Journal sensationally reported that she has been the subject of a probe by Facebook lawyers for months over her use of company staff and resources on her personal projects.

And we're not talking about PAs dashing out to collect her dry cleaning or pick up an oat milk latte, but people said to be working on her philanthropic foundation, promoting her next book, and allegedly organising her forthcoming wedding to Tom Bernthal, the chief executive of a marketing consultancy.

Both Facebook and Sandberg have denied that the internal investigation into her behaviour has anything to do with her decision to leave Facebook — she will be staying on as a member of the board of its parent company Meta Platforms — and the Journal conceded that senior Facebook executives often use company resources to get things done in areas of their private lives.

However, the allegations threaten to damage the legacy of a billionaire businesswoman who had such a central role in turning Facebook into a social media phenomenon, albeit one with a reputation for not doing enough to root out hate speech and 'fake news'.

Since the former management consultant and Google advertising expert joined the company in 2008 — four years after its founding — to be 'the adult in the room' and help it monetise its vast and growing base of users, its annual revenue has ballooned from $200 million to $117 billion last year.

Sandberg is accused of using company resources to plan her upcoming wedding to marketing executive Tom Bernthal (also pictured). She denies it had anything to do with her exit

And her rewards have been correspondingly vast. In 2020, Miss Sandberg took home just over $875,000 in basic pay, and a bonus of more than $900,000, as well as $19.7 million in shares. Her total net worth is put at $1.6 billion.

The Journal reported that her departure was the 'culmination of a years-long process in which one of the world's most powerful executives became increasingly burned out and disconnected' from Facebook.

Ms Sandberg (pictured at an abortions protest in Washington, DC) claimed to be leaving the company to focus on activism

But the way Sandberg pitches it, she was giving it all up for the sake of womankind.

'This is a really important moment for women,' she gushed about the Supreme Court's challenge to the historic Roe v Wade ruling that paved the way for legal abortion in the US. 'This is a really important moment for me to be able to do more with my philanthropy, with my foundation.'

She also said that after struggling to juggle work and home life, she wanted to spend more time with her family.

Miss Sandberg, whose first marriage ended in divorce after a year, had two children with her second husband, Dave Goldberg, who died in 2015 after an accident at a holiday villa in Mexico.

Then, in 2019, her former brother-in-law Rob set her up with Tom Bernthal. The couple became engaged in February 2020, Bernthal proposing with a ring decorated with five tiny hidden diamonds, representing their five children (Bernthal has three with his ex-wife).

In an intimate letter to Bernthal last year, published in Good Housekeeping, Sandberg said she 'could barely imagine dating again, much less getting married' after losing Goldberg. But she changed her mind upon meeting Bernthal.

The wedding is likely to include famous friends such as businesswoman Arianna Huffington, broadcaster Katie Couric and actress Kate Bosworth

Sandberg (pictured in Paris, 2017) will remain on the board of parent company Meta Platforms

But Sandberg's domestic bliss may well be marred by claims that were reported earlier this year.

The Wall Street Journal reported that there had been 'fresh irritation' at the top of Facebook over the newspaper's allegations that Sandberg had 'pressured' the Daily Mail's online operation to scrap an article about a temporary restraining order taken out against Miss Sandberg's then boyfriend, computer games tycoon Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard, by an old flame.

The woman later retracted some of the allegations and Meta denied that any threat against the website had ever been made.

Today, Meta has a market capitalisation of $455billion but its success has come at a price —and one that's been paid by its account holders.

With nearly three billion active users, many of us have clearly not been put off by the endless wave of negative headlines Facebook has attracted over the years, but the company has earned a reputation as uniquely duplicitous and venal even by Silicon Valley standards.

Sanberg (pictured in 2018) has been credited as a key to Facebook's decades-long success

Under Zuckerberg and Sandberg, the company lurched from scandal to scandal. Most notably, it was accused of running ads paid for by 'Russian actors' with links to the Kremlin during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

And it was sued for $150billion by displaced members of Myanmar's Rohingya community over claims it contributed to genocide in their homeland by not only failing to take down inflammatory posts about the country's Muslim minority but amplifying them via its algorithms.

However, the incident that may have proved a turning point for Sandberg's fortunes concerned the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook allowed it to harvest 87 million users' private information without their consent and use this data to target voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Mr Zuckerberg reportedly laid the blame for this fiasco — which saw Facebook fined £500,000 in the UK for a 'serious breach' of the law — squarely on the shoulders of Miss Sandberg, who apologised repeatedly for Facebook's mistakes over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and took personal responsibility. She told the Financial Times in April 2018: 'We made mistakes and I own them and they are on me.'

Insiders say her star started to fade at the company from that point.

Her legacy could be risked by an internal probe into alleged misuse of resources (Meta HQ)

But perhaps the most damaging blow to the company — and by extension Miss Sandberg — was struck last year by one of its own: Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen provided a shocking insight into the inner workings of the intensely secretive tech giant. She told Congress that the social media giant knew it was harming children, sowing division and undermining democracy, but continued to do so in pursuit of frenetic growth and 'astronomical profits'.

Haugen revealed an internal company study that found that 13.5 per cent of UK teenage girls said their suicidal thoughts became more frequent after joining the social media site Instagram, owned by Facebook.

Another leaked study found 17 per cent of female teenagers said their eating disorders got worse after using Instagram.

(Facebook countered that it had taken steps to rectify the failings identified by Ms Haugen.)

Who, one might well ask, walks away from all this carnage, lightly saying that they need to devote their valuable time and money to fighting for women's rights? It would have to be someone with a lot of chutzpah. And Miss Sandberg, a former high-flying U.S. Treasury official who was top of her class at Harvard Business School, certainly has that.

In 2013, she published her first book, Lean In: Women, Work And The Will To Lead, in which she argued that — contrary to received opinion that working mothers had to make compromises — they could have it all, if only they were a bit more like her. Put your career first, 'lean in' to your job, and the rest of your life will sort itself out.

Sandberg, pictured during a 2018 Senate hearing, was a leading light in corporate America

While she described it as a 'sort of feminist manifesto', many women lambasted Miss Sandberg as patronising and elitist.

She might be able to afford an army of childminders and helpers, but her advice was offensively unrealistic for most women, they said. A prominent U.S. columnist dismissed her as a 'PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots'.

On the back of the book, she launched a campaign — backed by Victoria Beckham and Beyoncé — to discourage the word 'bossy' on the grounds it puts girls down and discourages them from being ambitious.

People close to Miss Sandberg say she believes she wouldn't have been criticised so savagely during her time at Facebook if she'd been a man, and others have claimed that the conveniently timed revelations about an internal investigation into her behaviour smacks of a corporate smear campaign.

There certainly may be no shortage of Facebook colleagues happy to dish the dirt.

The woman who would take a ten-strong entourage when she visited Washington has long had a reputation for being regal and self-obsessed.

Insiders said she lives in a bubble, surrounded by confidants dubbed 'FOSS' (Friends Of Sheryl Sandberg) in the company.

She was rumoured to have considered running for a seat in the U.S. Senate and even the White House. In 2020, Facebook: The Inside Story, by technology writer Steven Levy portrayed Miss Sandberg as an image-obsessed tyrant who screamed at underlings but — like Zuckerberg — naively believed Facebook was entirely a force for good.

She had a reputation for ruthless if priggish efficiency, he said. 'It was like Wendy parachuting on to the island of Lost Boys,' Levy wrote of her arrival at a company that had a frat boy atmosphere.

It wouldn't be hard to outdo the robotic Zuckerberg — who once told Levy 'I don't optimise for fun' — in the charm stakes.

However, said Levy, Miss Sandberg 'was prone to yelling at subordinates when they did not live up to her demands' and had 'screaming matches' with a senior colleague.

He said she was so 'obsessed with her public image' that she not only hired a PR company but always told media interviewers she was 'nervous' in the hope of being given more sympathetic treatment.

In response, Miss Sandberg admitted she had high standards but disputed the allegations that she yelled at subordinates or has a fixation on her public image.

Hailed by some prominent feminists as a role model for working women, Miss Sandberg has ended up instead being a cautionary tale, say her detractors.

As she 'leans in' to new challenges, she can at least console herself that she probably won't need colleagues to sort out her private life. She'll soon have plenty of time, even for the wedding.

Opinion: Sheryl Sandberg's dangerous

delusion

Opinion by Nicole Hemmer
 Sat June 4, 2022


(CNN)Ten years ago, Sheryl Sandberg was on top of the world.

Facebook had just gone public, making Sandberg a billionaire. She had played a major role in creating that wealth. In 2007, the company's revenue was around $150 million. The next year, Sandberg joined Facebook. By 2011, its revenue was more than $3.7 billion.

While she reveled in the company's success, it was not the only project she cared about. She had recently begun to speak about the challenges women faced in the corporate world, and had landed on a solution: Women needed to seize more leadership opportunities and advocate more forcefully for themselves, an act she called "leaning in."

Sandberg, who announced on Wednesday that she would be stepping down as COO of Meta, Facebook's parent company, packaged her corporate-feminist philosophy into the 2013 book "Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead," which she co-authored with writer Nell Scovell. The book fit in well with her work at Facebook, capturing the sense of bootstrapping optimism that dominated US corporate and political culture during the Obama years.

A decade later, Sandberg's reputation has lost some of the luster it acquired in those heady days when "Lean In" debuted at the top of the best-seller lists. Facebook, tarnished by a series of scandals as well as major questions about its business model, has gone from being seen as Silicon Valley golden child to dystopian Big Brother. And intersectional feminism and the #MeToo movement have made the ideas in "Lean In" seem naïve at best.

Sheryl Sandberg's complicated legacy at Facebook

As tempting as it might be to reduce Sandberg's career to a hero-turned-villain story, it is far more useful as a guide to American culture and politics in the years between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s. In those two decades of head-spinning optimism, leaders like Sandberg became convinced that liberals could harness capitalism, using it to make themselves fabulously wealthy while also making the world a fairer, more just place. Their failures highlight the limits, if not the delusion, of that vision.

In the early 1990s, Sandberg joined her mentor Larry Summers at the World Bank, where he had just been hired as the chief economist. There, she worked on health projects in India, including leprosy and AIDS. She rejoined Summers in the late 1990s when he served as secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, where she focused on issues of international debt relief as a way of stabilizing developing nations during the Asian financial crisis. It was a set of experiences that suggested financial institutions could do more than generate wealth -- they could do good.

From there she joined Google, a rapidly-growing corporation that described its internal ethos with the phrase, "Don't be evil." Though a bare-minimum ethical commitment, Google's "don't be evil" motto captured the techno-utopianism coursing through Silicon Valley in the 2000s.

As developers created what are now the core companies structuring the way we use the internet, some company leaders saw an opportunity to rethink the way corporations worked. Not only would their offices be flexible and fun, but their companies would make the world a better place, without all the negative aspects that had defined corporate America for more than a century: labor abuses, manipulative practices, profit-over-people decision-making.

That belief in progressive corporations practicing ethical capitalism created an aura around Silicon Valley in the 2000s. No wonder the 2008 Obama campaign, which likewise believed old institutions could be remade by visionary young progressives, eagerly tapped into companies like Facebook. Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes left Facebook to join the campaign, which would be the first to make effective use of social media to organize its supporters.

After Barack Obama won the presidency, his administration retained ties with Facebook. Sandberg joined Obama's advisory council on jobs, which brought her into contact with the president. Both she and Obama were institutionalists, believing that they could reform institutions with their ideas, their innovation, and the very fact of their presence in those institutions: Sandberg, the rare woman leader in Silicon Valley, and Obama, the first Black president.

Both also faced significant criticism from people who saw their institutionalism as an overly optimistic analysis of the problems facing society. For Sandberg, this came in the form of sharp reviews of "Lean In" by critics like bell hooks, who dismissed the lean-in idea as a form of "faux feminism" that propped up exclusionary capitalist systems. "Sandberg effectively uses her race and class power and privilege to promote a narrow definition of feminism that obscures and undermines visionary feminist concerns," hooks wrote in 2013.

"Lean In" remained wildly popular during the Obama years, as did Facebook. But soon after Obama left office, the public began to sour on both. A New York Times investigation in 2018 discovered that leaders at Facebook, including Sandberg, had done little to stop Russian efforts to use the site to influence the 2016 US presidential election, despite being aware of the Russian campaign (at the time, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg pushed back, saying that Facebook had been slow to respond but was not as negligent as the New York Times report suggested). That same year, the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, revealing that Facebook had been involved in a major data-harvesting controversy.

At the same time, the MeToo movement underscored the profound problems with suggesting women should stop focusing on how men thwart their advancement and instead focus on how they could work harder and more intentionally to advance their careers. Though MeToo focused on sexual harassment and sexual violence, it became part of a much broader conversation about intersectional feminism and the limits of the kind of corporate feminism Sandberg espoused.
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The Obama administration, too, came in for renewed criticism during this period. The rise of Donald Trump and a radicalizing Republican Party made clear that Obama's commitment to bipartisanship, compromise, and technocratic governance had been ill-suited to respond to the perceived mounting threat of illiberalism.

There is no need to rehearse all those threats, or all the flaws with Facebook or girl-boss feminism. Those ideas now seem lost to a distant past, remnants of a naïve, even innocent, era. Which is why it is important to take this moment to look at Sandberg's career and recall the power of the promise of those years, as well as the critical flaws that ensured that promise would go unrealized.

Nicole Hemmer is an associate research scholar at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project and the author of "Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics" and the forthcoming "Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s." She cohosts the history podcasts "Past Present" and "This Day in Esoteric Political History." The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

Report: Sheryl Sandberg used Meta workers to support foundation, plan wedding

Sonya Herrera, Reporter - Silicon Valley Business Journal
Jun 13, 2022, 


Sheryl Sandberg, Meta Platform Inc.'s outgoing chief operating officer, is being investigated by lawyers working with Meta over her use of corporate resources — including staff time — to advance her work at the Lean In foundation as well as to plan her upcoming wedding, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

The Journal's coverage, which was based on information from anonymous sources, cast some doubt on the explanation that Sandberg gave publicly when she announced on June 1 that she would be leaving Meta after a transition period. In a post on Facebook, the social network owned by Meta, Sandberg said that after 14 years in her position "it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life."

She said she would be staying on Meta' board, planning her wedding to Kelton CEO Tom Bernthal and continuing to work on Lean In, the women's leadership movement she launched in 2013 with the publication of her book "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead." That led to the start of the Lean In foundation, nonprofit aimed at improving the inclusion and leadership of women in the workforce.

The Journal first reported the day after Sandberg's announcement that Meta had been looking into her actions since at least early this year. Sources told the Journal in that June 2 story that the company was looking into her alleged use of Meta resources to plan her wedding. The Journal also reported at the time that another topic under review deal with Sandberg's actions when she was romantically attached to Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, in which she reportedly helped prevent a U.K. newspaper from publishing a story about him.

Sonya Herrera covers early-stage startups and founders as well workforce and diversity issues for the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Sheryl Sandberg was under investigation at Meta for using corporate resources to plan her wedding, report says

Kelsey Vlamis
Jun 2, 2022,

Sheryl Sandberg announced Wednesday she is leaving Meta after 14 years.

The Wall Street Journal reported Meta was reviewing her personal activities as recently as May.

A Meta spokeswoman said the review was not related to Sandberg's decision to leave.

Meta's Sheryl Sandberg was under investigation for using corporate resources to plan her wedding, sources told The Wall Street Journal.

Sandberg announced Wednesday she would be stepping down as head of operations at Meta, Facebook's parent company, after 14 years. She said she will remain on the company's board of directors.

"I am not entirely sure what the future will bring — I have learned no one ever is," the "Lean In" author wrote in a Facebook post announcing the news. "But I know it will include focusing more on my foundation and philanthropic work, which is more important to me than ever given how critical this moment is for women."

Sandberg's announcement came around the same time the company was reviewing her use of corporate resources for wedding planning purposes. Sandberg announced in 2020 she was engaged to Tom Bernthal, the founder and CEO of a consulting firm based in Los Angeles.

The review, ongoing as of May, grew out of another investigation into Sandberg after The Journal reported in April that years prior she had pressed The Daily Mail, a UK tabloid, to stop reporting a story about her then-boyfriend Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard, and a temporary restraining order brought against him by an ex.

Meta did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Meta spokeswoman Caroline Nolan told The Journal: "None of this has anything to do with her personal decision to leave."

Former and current Meta employees recently told Insider's Kali Hays and Claire Atkinson that Sandberg had been gradually losing power at the company.