I guess if no Facebook exec ever wants to touch European soil again, that is an option.

Wouldn’t this have to be a criminal case for execs to be personally liable? I assume it isn’t a criminal case?

It's not, but not paying a fine can quickly become a criminal offense.

Does this apply to foreign companies? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

If it was a domestic company, of course, assets could just be seized to pay the fine plus whatever non payment penalty. Is there a criminal charge after asset seizure? Or does this just never happen because there is no incentive to do it domestically?

Not a lawyer, but shutting down a subsidiary to avoid overwhelming fines is de facto messing with the insolvency laws, isn't it? At least in Germany that is a criminal offense for which the executives of the (parent) company are ultimately liable.

Plus, Meta actually is a domestic company in the E.U. They handle all their E.U. business through an Irish subsidiary (which is why the Irish data protection agency is responsible for all of this) and they also have subsidiaries to manage political and customer relations in many other E.U. countries, as well as presumably data centers, etc. Removing all of this would be a big project and would give government agencies plenty of time to seize assets. These assets could also include non-tangibles, i.e. the .de/.fr domains for their websites.

Meta has plenty of EU-based assets which are not liquid enough to just pull out in a matter of months. The EU and national governments would also likely have options under insolvency laws and criminal statutes to freeze some of Meta's assets in the EU if the company made an attempt to pull out to avoid some fines. Of course Meta won't. The EU is a valuable market and even if Meta would stop making any profit (they won't), it can't just leave that market to the competition.