Zuckerberg 'lied' to Senate, Sandberg asked me to bed, says author

By Jennifer Szalai:

[...] “Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. What Wynn-Williams reveals will undoubtedly trigger her former bosses’ ire.

Not only does she have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods.

During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

[...] Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them, budget be damned. (The total cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg take turns sleeping in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s hair.

On the 12-hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams “come to bed.” Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed.

Sandberg isn’t the only person in this book with apparent boundary issues. Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard, who was hired as Facebook’s vice president of U.S. policy and eventually became vice president of global policy — Wynn-Williams’s manager.

A former Marine who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and who was part of the “Brooks Brothers riot” of 2000, which helped bring George W. Bush into office, Kaplan went on to serve as a deputy chief of staff in his administration. Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at a work event, announcing that she looks “sultry” and making “weird comments” about her husband.

[...] The book includes a detailed chapter on “Aldrin,” the code name for Facebook’s project to get unblocked in China. According to Wynn-Williams, the company proposed all kinds of byzantine arrangements involving China-based partnerships, data collection and censorship tools that it hoped would satisfy China’s ruling Communist Party.

Knowing that Zuckerberg would probably face questions about China from Congress, his team gave him cleverly worded talking points.

When Zuckerberg eventually appears before a Senate committee in 2018, a senator asks him how Facebook is handling the Chinese government’s unwillingness “to allow a social media platform — foreign or domestic — to operate in China unless it agrees to abide by Chinese law.”

In his reply, Zuckerberg states, “No decisions have been made around the conditions under which any possible future service might be offered in China,” to which Wynn-Williams comments: “He lies.”

Nobody becomes a billionaire telling the truth.