Let's get one thing straight. Meta just printed money. They announced a quarter so good it should have sent the stock into orbit. Revenue of over $51 billion, beating estimates. Earnings per share crushing expectations. The ad machine, the thing that actually pays the bills, is humming along like a finely tuned engine.
So, naturally, the stock got absolutely annihilated, tumbling 13% when the market opened.
You can almost picture the scene: some junior trader, coffee in hand, staring at the screen as the earnings numbers flash. He sees the beats, the massive revenue, and a smile starts to form. Then he sees the capital expenditure line, and the coffee cup just slips from his hand, shattering on the floor. Because that’s the whole story right there. Meta is a money-making machine attached to a money-burning furnace, and Mark Zuckerberg just keeps shoveling cash into the flames.
The Most Expensive Hobby in History
Zuckerberg is asking investors to fund his obsession, and it’s getting ridiculously expensive. He’s already incinerated over $70 billion—that’s billion with a ‘B’—on Reality Labs since 2020. For what? A metaverse that most people still think is a goofy VR chatroom. That division lost another $4.4 billion this quarter alone.
Now, the new boogeyman is AI.
He’s talking about spending up to $72 billion this year on capital expenditures, mostly for AI infrastructure, and even more in 2026. This is like a guy who wins the lottery and, instead of paying off his mortgage, announces he’s building a solid gold rocket ship to chase an alien he saw in a dream. It’s insane. The justification we get is a masterclass in corporate doublespeak. On the earnings call, Zuck said the spending will "very likely to be a profitable thing over, over some period."
"Over, over some period."
Let me translate that for you: "I have absolutely no idea when, or even if, this will pay off. Could be five years. Could be fifty. Could be never. Just keep the faith and don't look at the balance sheet too closely." And honestly, are we supposed to believe this is all for some benevolent pursuit of artificial superintelligence? Or is it just to build a system so powerful it can predict what you want to buy before you even think it, serving you an ad for it on your new $799 Ray-Ban spy glasses?
Follow the Money... Out the Door
Here’s where the story gets really interesting. While Zuckerberg is playing philosopher-king with Wall Street’s money, what are his top lieutenants doing? They’re selling.
Christopher K. Cox, one of the key insiders, dumped over $46 million worth of stock. CTO Andrew Bosworth, the guy literally in charge of the metaverse money pit, sold over $9 million worth—a staggering 86% of his entire holdings in the company.
Let that sink in. The guy building the future is cashing out of it.
This is the part that drives me crazy. The analysts, the so-called experts, see all this. They see the spending, they see the insider selling, and what do they do? They trim their price targets by a few bucks but keep their "Buy" and "Overweight" ratings plastered all over the stock. KeyCorp Has Lowered Expectations for Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) Stock Price, and Mizuho and Piper Sandler also trimmed targets, but it's a bad look. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—it's a complete dereliction of duty. They're trying to have it both ways: signal to their big-shot clients that they see the risk, while telling the retail schmucks to keep buying the dip.
The insiders are offcourse cashing out while the analysts are telling you to cash in. Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one. Maybe a $1.89 trillion company can afford to burn a country's GDP on a hunch. Maybe the metaverse is just around the corner and we’ll all be wearing headsets to our virtual cubicles...
But I wouldn't bet my own money on it. And it seems Boz and Cox won't either.
So, Who's Getting Played Here?
When you strip away all the jargon about capex and AI roadmaps, the picture is brutally simple. Meta’s core business is a cash cow. A golden goose. But the farmer has decided he’s not interested in the eggs anymore; he’s obsessed with teaching the goose to sing opera, and he’s willing to mortgage the entire farm to pay for the lessons. The insiders hear the screeching and are quietly selling the farm equipment before the whole thing goes under. The only ones left cheering are the people who have to pretend the singing sounds beautiful, because their jobs depend on it. Don't be one of them.
