Self-Dealing and CEO-Shielding at Facebook

Two recently unsealed lawsuits allege major wrongdoing by the mega-tech company Facdebook’s board of aging whiz kids, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Sheryl Sandberg, Michael Schroepfer (who resigned as Facebook CTO on 9-20) and Mark Zuckerberg. The suits contain allegations of insider trading, dodging privacy controls on the Facebook platform in service of an illegal business model, and the authorization of overpayment of an FTC fine by up to $4.9bn in order to protect Zuckerberg. The lawsuits, filed by two groups of shareholders last year, were made public on 9-21. The first amended complaint claims that the company paid “billions of dollars from Facebook’s corporate coffers,” to make Zuckerberg’s personal liabilities in respect to the 2019 Cambridge Analytica scandal disappear. A $5bn penalty was imposed by the FTC for “deceiving users” about their control over private data in the wake of Cambridge Analytica.