Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Gives $50 Million and Commits $50 Million More for New Foundation

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s embattled chief operating officer, is giving 334,300 Facebook stock shares valued at more than $50.7 million to her donor-advised fund, according to SEC documentation she filed today.

Sandberg came under fire this week after the New York Times reported that Facebook hired a political opposition research firm to discredit its critics after fallout from multiple reports about the way the social-media giant has handled Russian propaganda on its platform in recent years.

Her latest donation adds to a number of large gifts the tech executive has made in the past three years and after she signed the Giving Pledge in 2014. Including today’s contribution of Facebook stock, Sandberg has given more than $286.1 million to charity so far.

She gave her first public gift of $31 million in 2015 and has appeared twice on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors for other large contributions in 2016 and 2017.

It appears she has no intention to stop giving any time soon. Sandberg, whose net worth stands at about $1.6 billion, according to Forbes, announced earlier this year that she plans to donate her stock holdings in the company SurveyMonkey to charity (her late husband, Dave Goldberg, led SurveyMonkey from 2009 until his death in 2015), although she has not yet said when.

New Foundation

She plans to donate another $50 million in cash to start a new foundation called the Sandberg Goldberg Charitable Support Fund before the end of this year. She has not yet said what the new grant maker will support. Her philanthropy in past years has centered on giving to programs that help women and girls, the Second Harvest Food Bank, and a number of food banks that serve the needy in Silicon Valley.

A large majority of Sandberg’s latest gift to her donor-advised fund will back the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, which supports two groups she created — LeanIn.org, and OptionB.org. She started LeanIn.org in 2013 to foster female leadership around the world and later launched OptionB.org, an interactive website aimed at helping people facing grief and other types of personal adversity.

Some of the money from her latest donation will also go toward the David Goldberg Scholarship Program, which provides graduates of KIPP charter schools with mentoring and financial aid throughout college.

This article has been updated to include the number of shares recorded as donations in the SEC filing.