Meta’s former policy head to join Samsung: Report

A day after Meta announced the exit of its India public policy head Rajiv Aggarwal, a Bloomberg News report claims that he is joining Samsung in a similar role. Bloomberg cited officials aware of the matter, one of whom said that Aggarwal will start his new role in December and will be mediating with government officials on domestic policy matters for the South Korean company. 

Aggarwal joined Meta in September 2021 after a 1 year 10 months stint as head of public policy for India and South Asia at Uber. Before joining the private sector, Aggarwal was the joint secretary for Government of India from March 2015 to October 2019. Before that, he served as the SDM to the principal secretary for Government of Uttar Pradesh from September 1993 to March 2015.  

Meta India has seen the exit of three of its top executives this month. On November 3, the company announced the exit of Meta India head Ajit Mohan. 

This was followed by Aggarwal’s exit along with WhatsApp India head Abhijit Bose, who will also be taking up another entrepreneurial role soon. “After a small break, I plan to rejoin the entrepreneurial world; you’ll see announcements on that shortly,” Bose said in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday. 

Though Meta is yet to announce a replacement for Bose, they have promoted WhatsApp’s director for public policy in India Shivnath Thukral as the new India director of public policy for all three Meta companies -- Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Last week, Meta also announced that it is cutting 13% of jobs and letting go of 11,000 people. The layoff was part of the larger restructuring of teams at the social media company that has spent billions of dollars on the ambitious metaverse project.  

Meta also announced a freeze on hiring and is planning to reduce its real estate footprint by shifting to a hotdesk system for hybrid workers. After announcing the layoffs, Meta CEO Zuckerberg said in a blog post  that the social media company has been forced to make these changes as the revenue outlook is lower than expected at the beginning of this year.