Chief Operating Officer of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg attends the Cannes Lions Festival 2017 on June … [+]
Former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg married beau Tom Bernthal over the weekend in a Wyoming wedding. The big question is whether Sandberg had Bernthal, a former NBC News producer who founded marketing and consulting firm Kelton Global, sign a prenuptial agreement.
“I would be shocked if they didn’t have one,” Debra Schoenberg, a San Francisco-based divorce attorney and founder of Schoenberg Family Law Group, tells Forbes.
A spokesperson for Sandberg, who ceased serving at Meta Platforms COO on August 1st but will stay on at the company as a board member, declined to comment about whether she and her now-husband have a prenup agreement.
Prenups are extremely common for high net worth couples because “you want to have a plan to protect what you have,” says Brent Kaspar, a founding partner of Marin County, California-based law firm Kaspar & Lugay. Since both of them are older–Sandberg will turn 53 later this month and Bernthal is 50–they might be a little more rigid about sharing their assets, adds Kaspar. “They could have gone into it and said, ‘Anything I earn during the marriage, I keep.’”
Prenup agreements serve as a roadmap for the division of assets in the event of a divorce. In this case, Sandberg comes into the marriage with a fortune that Forbes pegs at $1.5 billion. It’s rare that a woman billionaire is in a position to ask her new husband to sign away his claim to half her fortune if they ever divorced.
Sandberg spent 14 years as Facebook’s chief operating officer, a high profile role that at times put her in the middle of controversies at the company. When she announced in May that she planned to step down, she said she would focus on her philanthropy as well as parenting her now five children with Bernthal. Sandberg had two kids with her late husband, Dave Goldberg, while Bernthal’s three children come from his first marriage. Goldberg, the CEO of SurveyMonkey, died suddenly of a heart attack in 2015.
“After both experiencing loss, @sherylsandberg and I weren’t sure we would ever find love again. Over the last three years, we’ve merged our lives and blended our families. Our wedding today was a dream come true,” Bernthal wrote in an Instagram post announcing the nuptials. His brother is the actor Jon Bernthal, who recently starred in Netflix’s “The Punisher.”
According to People, the wedding was Western-themed and took place at Trail Creek Ranch in Jackson, Wyoming. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, tennis star Serena Williams and business woman Ariana Huffington were among the guests. The couple was first introduced to each other by Sandberg’s late-husband’s brother. They got engaged in 2020.
Sandberg became known for her bestselling 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will To Lead, which encouraged women not to hold back, but instead to take on more leadership roles at work.
While working at Facebook, she sold more than 90% of her stock– about $2 billion worth of shares, before taxes. Her most recent sale was nearly three years ago, in October 2019. Sandberg still owns about 1.4 million shares of Meta Platforms, worth about $235 million.