In the meantime, the DC office hustled to accommodate the changing of the guard in Washington. At the start of every new administration, the Capitol’s lobbying sub-economy reboots, with companies reorienting their personnel and priorities to cater to the new party in charge. For Facebook, the change was like the ocean-churning 180-degree turn of a cruise ship. The company had tilted so far to please Trump that Zuckerberg’s effusive embrace of the Biden administration struck a dissonant chord for employees and political leaders. And it required a significant overhaul of its colossal lobbying operation.
But Facebook’s Washington office was hardly an underdog. The company had outspent nearly every other company to build up its defenses. In 2020, it ranked second among individual corporations across all sectors in lobbying, shelling out nearly twenty million dollars and outspending Amazon, Alphabet, Big Oil, Big Pharma, and retail. The years of nurturing relationships in both parties and ties to prominent business and political leaders paid their own dividends. Former board member Jeff Zients was appointed to lead Biden’s COVID task force. Former board member Erskine Bowles played a role in Biden’s transition team, as did Jessica Hertz, a Facebook attorney who had worked on the Cambridge Analytica investigation and who later was named the president’s staff secretary.
Democrats within the DC office jockeyed for the top positions of directly lobbying the White House and leading the team of congressional lobbyists. Though Clegg knew Biden from his time as the United Kingdom’s deputy prime minister, Sandberg was again the most powerful Democrat in the company. During the transition, a few press reports speculated that she could leave for a position in the Biden administration, possibly as a cabinet member. But her reputation and Facebook’s brand were too toxic, some Democratic operatives believed. Or, as one Biden transition adviser put it, “No fucking way.”
For some, decisions made under Joel Kaplan during the Trump administration had finally worn them out. Democratic lobbyist Catlin O’Neill left in January, telling friends her decision was based on an accumulation of actions she disagreed with, including the decision not to remove the manipulated video of her old boss, Speaker Pelosi. Others at the company felt more comfortable criticizing Kaplan and his track record. “If Joel is so good, why is our CEO testifying again?” an employee who worked on policy issues quipped when Zuckerberg was called before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on social media censorship days before the election. “Any other company would have fired their whole Washington office.”
But Kaplan’s job was secure. Even with a Democratic White House and Democratic majority in Congress, he continued to serve as vice president of global public policy. He had made it inside Zuckerberg’s inner circle. Kaplan would lie low in the new administration, and others would have more direct contact with the Biden White House, but he continued to have Zuckerberg’s ear on all political matters. “Joel will go when Joel is ready to go. Mark trusts very few people on policy, and Joel is in the center of that circle of trust,” the policy team member said. Cox and Boz remained firmly ensconced in that circle as well.
Also secure was Sandberg and Zuckerberg’s relationship. She had fallen short of his expectations at times, but Clegg absorbed some of the heat as he embraced the role of ambassador to one of the most chastised companies in the world—a role Sandberg was happy to shed, according to confidantes. She wasn’t interested in a shift into politics, people close to her said; she felt there was still too much she needed to fix at Facebook. She was also content with her personal life and not interested in any kind of disruption for her middle school–age children; she and her fiancé, Tom Bernthal, had combined their families. Berthnal’s three children had moved from Los Angeles to Menlo Park and enrolled in school there. Some employees claimed that they weren’t seeing her as often in high-level meetings, but Sandberg’s aides insisted this was due to a change in meeting schedules because of leaks to the press and working-from-home conditions due to COVID-19. Gossip aside, there was no question that in one significant aspect, she continued to hold up her end of the partnership: the constant churn of profits from the ad business she had masterminded.
On January 27, 2021, Zuckerberg and Sandberg displayed their unique dynamic in an earnings call with investment analysts, during which they delivered two very different messages. In yet another about-face decision on speech, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was planning to deemphasize political content in the News Feed because, he said, “people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our service.” He was still making calls on the biggest policy decisions. The announcement was also a tacit acknowledgment of Facebook’s years-long failure to control hazardous rhetoric running roughshod on the social network, particularly during the election. “We’re going to focus on helping millions of more people participate in healthy communities, and we’re going to focus even more on being a force for bringing people closer together,” he added.3
Then Sandberg shifted the focus to earnings. “This was a strong quarter for our business,” she said. Revenue for the fourth quarter was up 33 percent, to $28 billion, “the fastest growth rate in over two years.” During the pandemic, users were on the site more than ever—2.6 billion people used one of Facebook’s three apps every day—and advertisers were clamoring to reach them.
By the time you read this book, Facebook could look very different. Zuckerberg may step away from the job of CEO to spend more time on his philanthropic endeavors. The way people connect on Facebook may not be on a phone but on some other device, like augmented reality headsets. The company’s most popular utility may not be status updates and shares, but something like blockchain payments for retail goods or the production and distribution of blockbuster entertainment.
With $55 billion in cash reserves, the company has endless options to buy or innovate its way into new lines of business, as Google has with autonomous vehicles and Apple with health devices. Even during his annus horribilis of 2020, Zuckerberg was looking toward the future. In a quest to break into the lucrative field of corporate communications software, in late November, Facebook bought Kustomer for $1 billion. The popularity of the Zoom tool during the pandemic had rankled, and Zuckerberg challenged employees to come up with a videoconferencing rival. He directed more engineering resources to expand functions on virtual reality and augmented reality headsets, which he described as the new frontier for how people would communicate in the future. The company was also toying with publishing tools for users, fifteen years after the Washington Post’s Donald Graham offered to buy a stake in the tech start-up. And despite pressure from regulators, Zuckerberg was committed to developing its Libra blockchain currency project, which it rebranded as “Diem.”4