Meta wants to pay for its broad AI buildout with a newly created class of stock
Meta is making a big push into AI, and it’s creating a new kind of stock that could help pay for it. On Wednesday, as the company reported its third-quarter earnings, Semaforreportedthe company might issue non-voting stock, meaning shares that don’t give their owners a vote on company decisions, to help fund its push into artificial intelligence. During Meta’s earnings call, the company confirmed that reporting. Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, said the company plans to “create a new class of non-voting capital stock, which will be distributed to all existing shareholders through a stock dividend.” Li later added that the company “created this new class of shares with the purpose of creating a 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.” The shares will allow the company to maintain its current “founder-led structure,” she added. They will also expand its “funding tools and give us flexibility to invest behind the unprecedented momentum we’re seeing across every part of our business, driven by AI.” Meta’s earnings were strong this past quarter, beating Wall Street expectations. The company made $64 billion in revenue, a jump of 26% from a year earlier. Its costs and expenses also rose, however, by 68% year-over-year. Reality Labs, the division responsible for Meta’s AR glasses, VR headsets, and VR software, continues to lose money, though less than it used to. The company said in its earnings report that it expects the division’s losses to shrink from its 2025 levels to between $18 billion and $19 billion. Meta has made a big push into AI over the past year. The company has released several AI models, including Muse Spark and Muse Glimmer earlier this year. In recent weeks, it addedMuse Wonderand Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model whose underlying parameters are publicly available for outsiders to use and build on. Meta also launcheda coding agentfor software developers called Muse Code. At its Meta Connect event this year, the company announced a new line of cute and cuddly avatars for AI assistant, Meta Muse, in a push to make its AI services more relatable (and alsomeme-able). As far as can be discerned, those AI products are doing well. “In just a month and a half, more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada have set up Muse personal agents,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during Wednesday’s earnings call. “Growth continues to be strong, and we have been number one in the App Store almost every day.” “Now that Muse has clear product-market fit, we are entering a new phase and a more operational phase that is focused on scaling it,” Zuckerberg added, claiming later that the company expects to grow the product’s appeal to eventually “serve billions of people.” The company also noted that certain storm clouds linger on the horizon in the form of ongoing regulatory and legal issues. “We continue to monitor active legal and regulatory matters that could significantly impact our business and financial results,” said Li. “For example, we continue to see scrutiny on youth-related issues in several markets, and have a number of youth-related trials scheduled in the coming months in the United States.”
