Maybe you’ve heard something called the glass cliff. It’s a phenomenon discussed in a 2007 research paper by Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam that posits that women are overrepresented in leadership roles that are considered “risky or precarious.” You break through the glass ceiling, only to be pushed off a cliff. A pretty good example of this is the role Sarah Bond played at Microsoft—especially the way she was retroactively blamed for everything that went wrong with Microsoft’s gaming division. Now, you might think that Asha Sharma, the woman who became CEO of Xbox instead of Bond, is playing the same role. But I think she serves a different purpose. Asha Sharma is a pain sponge.
A “pain sponge” is how the character Tom Wambsgans describes himself in the series finale of the television show Succession. The show is fictional, though its observations about the world of business and the way that very rich people do not care about the wellbeing of anyone other than themselves, often felt prophetic while it was on the air. When Great Hill Partners began dismantling the network of websites they had christened G/O Media, Deadspins’s then-editor in chief Megan Greenwell wrote an incisive essay about the inherent cruelty of businessmen who consider themselves the “adults in the room.”
“The tragedy of digital media isn’t that it’s run by ruthless, profiteering guys in ill-fitting suits; it’s that the people posing as the experts know less about how to make money than their employees, to whom they won’t listen,” she wrote. “‘It’s still a killer business,’ Kendall Roy tells his father Logan in the latest episode of Succession, in which Logan debates whether to pull the plug on Vaulter, a digital media company run by the family business. ‘The platform, the brands, ethos and culture are leading edge, and in my view, it’s fixable. All they need is adults in the room.’”
The terminology of pain sponge becomes similarly useful preceding another tragedy that is going to ruin the lives and livelihoods of thousands of people. Sharma appears more or less qualified for her job. She has a business background that makes her promotion make a kind of sense, especially given that was previously president of CoreAI at Microsoft and the company appears to be going all in on AI. But what really stood out to me on her resume were her previous roles at Instacart and Meta.
While Sharma left her role as COO at Instacart in 2024, a year before Consumer Reports’ investigation into the company’s experiments with AI-driven dynamic pricing, she was there when Instacart acquired the AI company Eversight.
“In 2022, Instacart’s business model underwent a fundamental change with the acquisition of a tech company called Eversight, whose AI technology enabled Instacart to start experimenting with prices,” reads a research paper from Groundwork Collaborative. “In a section of its website titled ‘Eversight: Optimize your pricing with AI,’ Instacart advertises its Eversight tools as a way to ‘continuously drive growth with dynamic pricing.’ Instacart’s CEO reiterated this on a 2024 earnings call, explaining that new AI-powered pricing algorithms help ‘to really figure out which categories of products our customers [are] more price sensitive on’ and set prices ‘based on that information.’”
This is not to say that AI dynamic pricing is something that Sharma implemented herself. But as chief operating officer, executing a scheme where you fuck over your customers by changing the price of bread algorithmically happened under her tenure.
Sharma was also VP of Product and Engineering at Meta between 2017 and 2021, and her LinkedIn says that she was “Head of Product across Messenger + Instagram Direct and GM of calling, video, + kids experiences.” In 2021, an article in the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta’s own internal research showed that they knew that their products created mental health issues in teenagers.
“We make body-image issues worse for one in three teenage girls,” one slide obtained by the Wall Street Journal said.
In 2026, Meta was brought to trial over concerns about social media creating a mental health crisis in teenagers and children. While Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied the claims, saying that children under 13 are not allowed on the platform, there is a lot of evidence to the contrary.
“‘If we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens,’” read one internal document presented at the trial. Zuckerberg called this a mischaracterization.
Again, these aren’t necessarily Sharma’s vision. But they are things she was in some way party to.
When Tom Wambsgans is asked to describe himself by Lukas Mattson, a potential buyer of the company at which Tom is a high powered executive, he says that he has a great capacity for taking pain.
“I have a very, very high tolerance for pain and discomfort,” he says, and as if to test this, Mattson goes on to say that he’d like to fuck Tom’s wife.
After humiliating him, Mattson offers Tom the role of CEO of the American branch of the post-merger company.
“Honestly, I’m not looking for a partner,” Mattson says. “I’m looking for a front man. Cause, we’re gonna cut shit close to the bone. We’re gonna get right in there. It’s gonna get nasty. So I need a pain sponge. Would that be a problem?”
It is not a problem for Tom, a man who has spent most of the run of Succession taking the blame and being abused. He becomes CEO.
It’s possible to imagine Sharma having a similar kind of conversation. Who better to be the face of Xbox when it lays off thousands of people and destroy the studios that it’s acquired? She will absorb a share of the hatred, pain, and anger people will have at Microsoft in that moment because that is the job that was handed to her. It is also a glass cliff—gaming as an industry in general seems pretty precarious—but creating a receptacle for everyone’s displeasure is specifically what this job is right now. She’s the CEO overseeing this massacre. Her name is attached to it. Her name will appear in the articles about these layoffs. It’s her responsibility to both carry out and absorb the pain of the public and of the workers who will lose their jobs. She better have, like Tom Wambsgans, a high tolerance for pain and discomfort, because she will be doling it out and then receiving all the blowback.
Whatever else is going to go on at Xbox after this ultimately doesn’t matter for Sharma. Every company eventually needs a pain sponge. That’s how the adults in the room operate.
