Meta plans non-voting shares as AI investment and costs rise

A financing tool that preserves control

Meta CFO Susan Li said the new shares would trade publicly. The company could use them to raise capital, pay employees, make acquisitions and meet other corporate needs. Li said the structure would preserve Meta’s founder-led governance while giving it more ways to finance investment as the business grows.

That flexibility matters against a widening gap in the latest results:

Meta’s revenue in the previous quarter beat Wall Street analysts’ expectations, reaching $64 billion, up 26% from a year earlier. Expenses rose 68% year over year over the same period.

Reality Labs, which develops augmented-reality glasses, virtual-reality headsets and their software, continues to lose money, though its losses have narrowed. Meta expects the division’s losses to fall from their 2025 level to $18–19 billion.

From model launches to scale

Meta has expanded its AI lineup over the past year. It introduced Muse Spark and Muse Glimmer earlier this year, followed in recent weeks by Muse Wonder and Muse Spark Open. The latter has open parameters that outside developers can use to build their own products.

The company has also launched Muse Code, a coding agent for developers, and shown a new line of friendly-looking avatars for its Meta Muse assistant at this year’s Meta Connect. Meta’s stated aim is to make its AI services easier to understand and more appealing to users.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday’s earnings call that more than 10 million people in the US and Canada had set up Muse personal AI agents in the first month and a half. He said the service was growing quickly and ranked first in the App Store almost every day. Zuckerberg said Meta was moving from finding product-market fit to scaling, and later said the company hoped to make the service useful to billions of people over time.

The unanswered question

I think the share plan is less a vote of confidence in any one AI product than a way to widen Meta’s funding options while keeping its existing voting structure intact. The announcement does not say how much capital the new shares might raise, or how much of the investment flexibility would go toward AI rather than other corporate uses.

That distinction matters when expenses are growing faster than revenue and Reality Labs remains loss-making. Meta also warned that ongoing litigation and regulatory reviews could significantly affect its business and financial results. The company faces youth-related inquiries in several markets, with several US trials scheduled in the coming months.