Meta wants to pay for its broad AI buildout with a newly created class of stock
The social media giant is planning a new stock strategy to help power its broad investments in AI models and services.
Key points
- Meta plans to create a new class of non-voting stock to be distributed to existing shareholders through a stock dividend.
- Meta's third-quarter revenue rose 26% to $64 billion, while costs and expenses increased 68% year over year.
- CEO Mark Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada set up Muse personal agents in about a month and a half.
Meta is creating a new class of non-voting stock to help fund its push into artificial intelligence, the company confirmed during its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. The move follows a Semafor report that the company might issue shares that carry no vote on company decisions.
Chief financial officer Susan Li said the new shares will be distributed to all existing shareholders through a stock dividend. She said the purpose is to create publicly traded non-voting stock usable for capital raising, employee compensation, acquisitions and other general corporate purposes, while preserving the voting power of existing Class A and B shareholders.
Earnings and Reality Labs
Meta reported $64 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 26% from a year earlier, beating Wall Street expectations. Costs and expenses also rose, by 68% year over year.
Reality Labs, the division behind Meta's AR glasses, VR headsets and VR software, continues to lose money, though less than before. The company said it expects the division's losses to shrink from its 2025 levels to between $18 billion and $19 billion.
In just a month and a half, more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada have set up Muse personal agents
— Mark Zuckerberg
AI products and legal scrutiny
Meta has released several AI models over the past year, including Muse Spark and Muse Glimmer, and more recently Muse Wonder and Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model. It also launched a coding agent called Muse Code and announced new avatars for its AI assistant, Meta Muse.
Zuckerberg said Muse has found "clear product-market fit" and the company is now focused on scaling it. Li also said Meta continues to monitor legal and regulatory matters, including scrutiny on youth-related issues in several markets and youth-related trials scheduled in the coming months in the United States.
