'Careless People': the shocking exposé by a former Meta executive

An explosive dispatch from someone who had a front-row seat to the inner workings of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People takes readers inside Meta’s boardrooms, private jets and meetings with heads of state — revealing the appetites, excesses, blind spots and priorities of executives Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan.

Wynn-Williams paints a portrait of this group as profoundly flawed, self-interested and careless human beings, callously indifferent to the price others would pay for their own enrichment.

With an outsider’s perspective, she watched as the more power they grasped, the less responsible they became — with far-reaching consequences that continue to this day. 

Among other never-before-told bombshell revelations, Wynn-Williams details the previously unreported lengths to which Mark Zuckerberg went to convince the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to allow Meta to operate in China, including providing briefings to CCP officials on new technologies like artificial intelligence, developing bespoke censorship tools with the CCP and making efforts to hide Meta’s co-operation with the CCP from the US Congress. 

In a sharp and unflinching voice, Wynn-Williams provides an intimate story of Meta’s rise and her futile attempts to get the company to stop genocide-fuelling lies and hate speech, to shocking accounts of workplace harassment and misogyny, to the gruelling demands and humiliations of working motherhood during the same time that Sandberg was winning international acclaim for urging women to “Lean In”.

With the audacity of The Trading Game, the emotional intelligence of Educated and the dark humour of This Is Going to Hurt, Careless People exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold, where a few people heedlessly hold the world in their hands.

Sarah Wynn-Williams worked as a diplomat for New Zealand, including in Washington DC. She joined Meta after pitching a job and ultimately became director of global public policy.

After leaving Meta she has continued to work on tech policy, with a focus on artificial intelligence.

The book is being hailed by the New York Times book review as “an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”.

Careless People is now available in bookstores.