Stan Chudnovsky of Facebook
Horacio Villalobos | Corbis | Getty Images
Facebook’s executive exodus continued on Tuesday with Stan Chudnovsky, the head of the company’s Messenger division, announcing that he will be leaving in 2022.
Facebook, now called Meta, has dealt with a wave of high-profile executive exits this year. The company faces increased regulatory scrutiny and a major public relations challenge following the release of internal documents and news reports illustrating how much Facebook knows about the harms caused by its services.
Deborah Liu, formerly the head of Facebook Marketplace, left in February to become CEO of Ancestry.com. David Fischer, who was chief revenue officer, announced his departure in March, as did Kevin Weil, one of the co-founders of Facebook’s Novi cryptocurrency division.
The company’s former ads chief, Carolyn Everson, announced she would be leaving in June and later went to grocery delivery app Instacart as president. Fidji Simo, who was head of the Facebook app, became CEO of Instacart after leaving Facebook in July.
Mark D’Arcy stepped down from his role as chief creative officer in August, and the next month Facebook’s technology chief Mike Schroepfer said he would be leaving the company. In November, David Marcus, the head of Facebook’s cryptocurrency efforts and previously the head of Messenger, announced his coming departure at the end of the year. Earlier Tuesday morning, the head of Facebook’s Workplace enterprise communications software Julien Codorniou announced that he had left the company to go into venture capital.
Chudnovsky’s departure announcement comes one week after that of Marcus, both of whom came worked on Messenger after working together at PayPal. The two are very close, according to another former Facebook executive.
“I love this company and this team, and as a result, making this call turned out to be one of the hardest decisions in my life,” Chudnovsky said. “I have no plans to retire, but I am looking forward to taking a good, many months long break, spending more time with my friends, helping companies, helping people, traveling, reading, exploring, and learning.”
Chudnovsky took over Messenger from Marcus in May 2018. He joined Facebook in 2015 as head of product for the Messenger unit. Chudnovsky said he will stay at Facebook until the second quarter of 2022.
He will be replaced by two executives. Loredana Crisan will take over Chudnovsky’s responsibilities over Messenger, Instagram direct messaging and Messenger Kids while Maher Saba will lead Facebook’s remote presence products, which include audio calling, video calling and the Facebook’s Rooms 50-person video calling product.
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable even thinking about leaving if I didn’t have many amazingly talented leaders on my team who are ready to step up,” Chudnovsky said in a post.
Chudnovsky’s exit from the company was first reported by Bloomberg.
