New Trier Alum Unexpectedly Out As Top Facebook Product Executive

SAN FRANCISCO — Chris Cox, the New Trier High School alum put in charge of all of the company's products last year, announced his surprise departure Thursday. After 13 years as a top lieutenant of Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, Cox becomes the latest of several senior executives to leave the company as it pivots toward focusing on integrating Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram into what its founder described as a "privacy-focused social platform."

In a statement announcing his resignation, Cox said nearly every one of his personal highs and lows throughout the last decade had been intertwined with Facebook, Zuckerberg and its employees. He did not say why he was stepping down.

"It is with great sadness I share with you that after thirteen years, I’ve decided to leave the company," he said. "Since I was twenty-three, I’ve poured myself into these walls."

Cox, 36, has been an engineer, director of human resources and chief product officer for the company. Last May, Cox was put in charge of all the company's "family of apps," including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, in the company's first major management shake-up.

The history of social media is still unwritten, and its effects are "not neutral," Cox said, announcing his departure on the social network.

"As its builders we must endeavor to understand its impact — all the good, and all the bad — and take up the daily work of bending it towards the positive, and towards the good," Cox said. "This is our greatest responsibility."

Cox, a 2000 New Trier High School graduate, was born in Atlanta and grew up in Winnetka, according to a 2012 profile in the Chicago Tribune. His mother was a humanities teacher at New Trier and his father an executive at insurance broker Aon in Chicago, it said. One of his teachers was the New Trier Superintendent Paul Sally, who remembered Cox for "his focus, his creativity and his vibrant personality."

Former employees who asked not to be named told CNBC Cox was one of the company's most popular executives. One said he could "bring you to tears" when talking about the importance of new features and that, to the average employee, the company without him is "almost unimaginable." Another described him as the "heart and soul of the Facebook mission."

In a statement Thursday, Zuckerberg said Cox, who joined the company a year after its founding in 2005, had helped built the "original News Feed," the first human resources team at the company and oversaw the strategy for the company's portfolio of mobile apps.

"For a few years, Chris has been discussing with me his desire to do something else. He is one of the most talented people I know and he has the potential to do anything he wants," Zuckerberg said. "But after 2016, we both realized we had too much important work to do to improve our products for society, and he stayed to help us work through these issues and help us chart a course for our family of apps going forward."

In addition to Cox, the head of WhatsApp, Chris Daniels, also departed the company this week. The New York Times reported both disagreed with Zuckerberg's push to combine the company's several apps into a single platform, citing half a dozen people involved in the situation.

Other senior executives to leave the company in roughly the past year include its head of policy, its general counsel, its chief security officer, the founders of WhatsApp and Instagram, and its top communications executive, according to the Washington Post.

Facebook lost 15 million users in the U.S. between 2017 to 2018, but Instagram, which it bought for $1 billion in 2012, continued to add users, according to survey data released by Edison Research last week.

The company is currently facing investigations by the securities fraud division of the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"As we’ve said before, we are cooperating with investigators and take those probes seriously," the company tweeted on Wednesday. "We've provided public testimony, answered questions, and pledged that we will continue to do so."

According to CNBC, Facebook shares fell Friday, during a week when Facebook suffered its longest ever outage and drew criticism for allowing a gunman to live stream a terrorist attack in New Zealand.