“Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism” by Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025) is a whistleblower memoir focused on her career at Facebook, now Meta. I first heard about the book last month while listening to one of my favorite podcasts Honestly with Bari Weiss. After hearing about her epic high and low experiences, I knew I needed to read the book.
Overview: Sarah walks us through the seven years of her tenure at Facebook and how her pitched and landed a global policy position that didn’t exist in part due to her obsession with believing Facebook was a force to change the world for the better. It walks us through her “honeymoon” years of getting closer to Mark (CEO) and Sheryl (COO) and orchestrating presidential relationships with countries all over the world. Her tone changes over time as she witnesses and experiences first hand how power corrupts and builds her growing family. The book ends with her being fired, in essence, for reporting harassment.
Key Message: She tells her readers that it is critical in the age of AI that the world understands who are making these decisions (Hunger Games for the. 0001 percent) and what the impact can be of their decisions.
Supplemental Information:
Where it Falls Short: The first half of the book was better written than the last. Towards the end, the years jumped around quite a bit to summarize the chapter topic, rather than move in a sequential fashion that built momentum in the earlier chapters. I was also confused about her role in growing Facebook’s business in China. I would like to understand more about the part she played, rather than what she saw Mark doing illegally.
Overall Assessment & Why: I rate it a 6 out of 10 in terms of a personal development book. She wasn’t writing it in order to showcase her development, rather than expose the lack of it in others. The way I see it, the “Cautionary Tale” is a good reminder that an unbalanced ego is your idealized self gone too far.