Meet Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Highest Paid Employee

Question: who is Sheryl Sandberg? Answer: she’s the person many people might expect to be Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook’s highest paid employee.

The Facebook IPO has made Zuckerberg an overnight multi-millionaire, but it also revealed the fact that chief operating officer Sandberg, a 42-year-old working mother who describes herself as the ‘grown-up’ at the company, makes the most money at the social network.

In financial year 2011, Sandberg’s income was a $300,000 base salary plus $30,491,613 in Facebook shares. In addition, she has 38,122,000 restricted stock units (worth approx. $1.15 billion at $30/share) that will be completely vested by October 2020, subject to her continued employment through the vesting date. Such figures dwarf even Zuckerberg’s fortune. When the company goes public, Sandberg will be one of the wealthiest self-made women in the world.

She was lured from Google by Zuckerberg in 2008, after the entrepreneur took her to dinner twice a week for six weeks running. When finally at Facebook, her mission was simple: make Facebook profitable.

Before Sandberg’s arrival, the company was “primarily interested in building a really cool site; profits, they assumed, would follow.” Sandberg pioneered the discreet presentation of Facebook adverts and oversaw the firm’s business operations. By 2010, Facebook was turning profits in the millions.

She’s been ranked one of the 50 ‘Most Powerful Women in Business’ by Fortune magazine since 2008, became a member of the Walt Disney Company board in 2009, and joined the Board of Directors of Starbucks in 2010, a role that comes with a tidy $280,000 annual salary.

So, Mark Zuckerberg: not Facebook’s highest paid employee by a long shot. Surprised?