Meta's new stock class: a tool for AI expansion

Meta is making a big push into AI, and it’s creating a new kind of stock that could help pay for it. The company confirmed it is creating a new class of non-voting stock to help fund its artificial intelligence initiatives. This new class of shares will allow the company to maintain its current founder-led structure while expanding its funding tools and giving it flexibility to invest in AI.

The company’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, said the new shares will be distributed to all existing shareholders through a stock dividend. The shares will preserve the voting power of existing shareholders and will be used for capital raising, employee compensation, acquisitions, and other general corporate purposes.

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 added Muse Wonder and Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model whose underlying parameters are publicly available for outsiders to use and build on. Meta also launched a coding agent for 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 also meme-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. 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. We expect 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. 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.