Offering Condolences to Sheryl Sandberg, But Feeling Manipulated

Dave Goldberg and FACEBOOK exec wife Sheryl Sandberg

I am deeply saddened by the news that Dave Goldberg, the husband of FACEBOOK executive Sheryl Sandberg has passed away at the age of 47.  Money is no buffer from the pain of widowhood at such a young age and the challenge of being left to raise two kids without a father. Being a billionaire does, however, allow one in the midst of sudden tragedy to maneuvre the public into flooding the airwaves with condolences without being told what caused Mr. Goldberg's death.  But why should it matter?

The public's interest in knowing what precipitated the death of a prominent figure in the prime of life is a legitimate one. If he wasn't a public icon, then why all the news headlines and public expressions of condolences? Perhaps it was of natural causes, for which everyone seeing Dave Goldberg's photo might take heed in their doctors' orders to lose weight or reduce the stress in their lives.  Being one half of a power couple, both billionaires in their own right, might understandably be stressful.

This  lack of information about the cause of death of SurveyMonkey's CEO,  fuels darker speculation. Could the cause have been suicide, in which case stockholders in his Company would want to be alerted if there were serious business problems or even an impending investigation, which might  affect stock values.   Or might it even have been drug-related, which is not unheard of among Silicon Valley executives?

FACEBOOK executive, Sheryl Sandberg, wrote a noted but controversial book, Lean In, in which she declared that women could in fact have it all. Her husband figured prominently in the book's pages because she credited his support as being pivotal to her own success.  Might Ms. Sandberg have "tempted fate," as my grandmother might have opined, in getting women to believe in a carefully crafted lie rather than reality?  In any case, FACEBOOK has succeeded in part because it has chipped away at everyone else's privacy.  Dave Goldberg's widow has simply not earned the privacy she now demands.   And the mainstream media has just dropped one more notch in the public's estimation by going no further than printing uninformative press releases from the family's highly-paid PR consultants.

NOTE:   The New York Times just reported the following:

Dave Goldberg, the chief executive of SurveyMonkey and husband of Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, died of head trauma Friday night after he collapsed at the gym at a private resort in Mexico, according to a Mexican government official.
Mr. Goldberg, 47, was on vacation with family and friends at the Four Seasons Resort near Punta Mita, close to Puerto Vallarta in southwest Mexico, according to a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in Nayarit State. Mr. Goldberg left his room around 4 p.m. on Friday, collapsed while exercising and died of head trauma and blood loss, said the spokesman. His brother, Robert Goldberg, found him on the floor of the gym at the resort at around 7 p.m., with blood around him. The spokesman said it appears “he fell off the treadmill and cracked his head open.”