Meta wants to pay for its broad AI buildout with a newly created class of stock

On its third-quarter earnings call, Meta confirmed it will create a new class of non-voting capital stock, distributed to existing shareholders through a stock dividend. CFO Susan Li said the shares can be used for raising capital, employee compensation, acquisitions and general purposes while preserving the voting power of Class A and B holders and the company's founder-led structure.

The backdrop is a company spending heavily. Meta reported $64 billion in revenue, up 26% from a year earlier and ahead of Wall Street expectations, but costs and expenses rose 68% year over year. It also flagged ongoing legal and regulatory risk, including scrutiny of youth-related issues and several youth-related trials scheduled in the U.S. in the coming months.

We see two stories here, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is financial engineering in service of AI: Meta wants more ways to pay for models, agents and the people who build them, and a liquid non-voting share is a flexible currency for hiring and deals. Given how fast its AI products are moving, that's a rational move.

The second is governance. Meta already has a structure that concentrates control with its founder. Non-voting stock lets the company raise money and pay people without diluting that control at all. Li was explicit that this is the point. For a company making some of the most consequential AI bets on earth, with youth-safety trials on the calendar, we think less accountability to shareholders is the wrong direction.

The AI momentum is real by Meta's own account. 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, and that the app has been at or near the top of the App Store. He says the next phase is about scaling Muse toward billions of people. That's exactly when outside checks matter most.

Costs growing far faster than revenue are sustainable while the core ad business is strong. If that changes, investors holding non-voting shares will have no vote to push back with. I'm watching how much of this stock actually gets issued, and for what.

Semafor first reported the plan before Meta confirmed it on the call. Meta's recent AI releases include Muse Spark and Muse Glimmer, Muse Wonder, the open-weight Muse Spark Open, and the Muse Code coding agent, along with new avatars for its Meta Muse assistant shown at Meta Connect. Reality Labs continues to lose money; Meta expects its losses to come in between $18 billion and $19 billion, below 2025 levels.