Twelve years after joining Facebook, Laurent Solly has announced he is stepping down as Meta’s vice president for Europe. The group has yet to name a successor and is also contending with the departure of Yann LeCun, who led its artificial intelligence projects.

Laurent Solly joined Facebook in June 2013 as managing director for France. Three years later, he became vice president for Southern Europe, before being appointed vice president for Europe in 2025. Prior to that, he spent six years at the TF1 group, where he oversaw its advertising business. From 1996 to 2007, he worked in the public sector and served as deputy director of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign.

“This adventure at Meta has given me immense professional satisfaction, introduced me to Silicon Valley, its boundless energy and ambition, exposed me to new markets and cultures, taught me about international business, helped me understand the intensity and speed of the technological transformations under way, and made me realise the impact of the upheavals, opportunities, and challenges we are experiencing,” says the executive.

While no successor has yet been named to take on the European vice presidency, Laurent Solly’s former role as head of the group’s French operations was filled over the summer by Pierric Duthoit, who reports to Derya Matras, vice president for EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa).

The “godfather of AI” departs

Laurent Solly’s departure comes on top of another high-profile French exit. In November, Yann LeCun, one of Meta’s leading experts in artificial intelligence, a pioneer of deep learning, and commonly referred to as one of the “godfathers of AI,” left the group.

In a mid-December interview, he cited mounting pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and senior leadership, which he said led to the failure of the Llama 4 AI model, deemed obsolete upon its unveiling in April 2025.

Yann LeCun is now targeting a $3 billion valuation for his venture, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, which seeks to go beyond language models (LLMs) to develop advanced AI systems capable of understanding the world, not just generating text or statistical responses.

Meta generated €158.1 billion in revenue in 2024, with estimated EBITDA of €94.5 billion. The US and Canada accounted for 38.5% of revenue, followed by Asia-Pacific (27.3%) and Europe (23.3%). The group derives 94.3% of its revenue from advertising, compared with around 1% from services (payments, premium subscriptions, licences, etc.) and 1.3% from virtual reality- an area that, before the advent of generative AI, was expected to become a growth driver for the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp.