Designer Jony Ive and OpenAI’s Sam Altman Discuss AI Hardware ProjectRead more

Photo by Alaska Air Group.

For Meta’s Next CFO Susan Li, Metaverse Dreams Mean Real-World Challenges

Photo: Photo by Alaska Air Group.

When Meta Platforms reported its first-ever quarterly revenue decline last month, the Facebook parent company also made a key promotion with little fanfare: 36-year-old finance executive Susan Li would become chief financial officer in the fall, replacing longtime CFO Dave Wehner, who held the role for eight years and would transition to a strategy role.

It marked the latest step in Li’s rise within Meta, which she joined in 2008 following a short stint on Wall Street after graduating from Stanford University at 19 years old. Li made her mark early on with her work on Meta’s 2012 initial public offering, and she’s gained allies across the company’s business lines thanks to her knack for pairing financial acumen with big-picture business strategy, former colleagues told The Information.

But the promotion of one of the youngest CFOs at a major company also comes at an awkward time: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives have implied during recent meetings and in memos that the company is bloated and employees are underperforming. On the finance team, Li was the person in charge of forecasting revenue as the company’s workforce almost doubled to about 84,000 in the past two and a half years.

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