A source close to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says a report that she is planning a run for Senate "is 100% untrue."
The report was published this morning in The Daily Mail.
The Mail's Sara Nathan and David Martosko reported that Sandberg would "likely" challenge sitting California Democratic senator Barbara Boxer in a primary.
The general election for that seat isn't until 2016.
When the story first hit, we warned readers to take the news with a grain of salt. The Daily Mail is a British tabloid that doesn't have a great record of publishing breaking U.S. political news.
That said, there has been speculation that Sandberg would quit Facebook for a political career for a long time.
During a trip to Silicon Valley last fall, a wealthy supporter of Democratic candidates told us there would be lots of backers for a Sandberg run. But this supporter speculated Sandberg would run for Senator Diane Feinstein's seat when she retires in 2018.
In part this is because she started her career in the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration.
The speculation has also been fueled by Sandberg's popular feminist manifesto, "Lean In" — the marketing of which has at times felt like the beginning of a movement or a campaign than a mere publicity tour.
Sandberg joined Facebook as COO in 2007 following a successful run at Google where she helped build the company's massive sales force. Prior to her joining, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had gone through several No. 2s. In Sandberg, he finally found someone who would not pressure him to sell the company, didn't want his job, and was able to turn his motley collection of hackers into an organized, profitable, big company.
At the World Economics Forum this past January, Sandberg reportedly said politics are "not for me."
"I just have a wholesale agreement that we need more women in politics."
Update: We updated this post with a response to the Daily Mail story from a source close to Sandberg.
