So let’s get this straight. Meta beats revenue expectations by over a billion dollars, pulling in a staggering $51.24 billion, and the reward is watching its stock get body-slammed by 9%?
Welcome to the new math of Silicon Valley, where the numbers you see don’t matter nearly as much as the story they’re trying to sell you. And the story Meta is peddling right now is a masterclass in corporate gaslighting. They want you to stare at a burning pile of cash and call it "investment." They want you to ignore a gaping hole in their earnings and dismiss it as "a one-time charge."
Give me a break.
I can just picture the earnings call. Some poor soul in investor relations, probably sweating through their Allbirds, trying to explain with a straight face why an earnings per share of $1.05 isn’t a complete catastrophe when Wall Street was expecting nearly seven bucks. The secret, they whisper, is a little accounting trick. A $15.93 billion "one-time, non-cash income tax charge."
Poof. Just like that, the bad number disappears. It’s not real, you see. It’s non-cash. It's one-time. Don't worry your pretty little head about it. But when a "one-time" charge is big enough to buy, I don't know, a dozen smaller social media companies, doesn't it stop being a footnote and start being the headline?
The Great AI Money Furnace
Let's be real. That tax charge is a smokescreen. It’s a convenient distraction from the real story buried in the numbers, the one that actually has investors spooked. The real story is the spending.
This is a bad plan. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of capital expenditure.
Meta jacked up its capex guidance for the year to as high as $72 billion. Seventy-two. Billion. Dollars. And to make sure everyone understands this isn't a temporary insanity, CFO Susan Li casually mentioned that capex growth will be "notably larger in 2026 than 2025."
This isn't an investment strategy; it's a religious sacrifice to the god of Artificial Intelligence. Zuckerberg and his cohort are shoveling money into a furnace of servers and infrastructure with the blind faith that some magical, profit-generating AI genie will eventually pop out. It's like a compulsive gambler at a Vegas high-roller table, doubling down on a losing hand because they're convinced the next card will be the one that saves them. They’re buying more and more expensive shovels with no guarantee there’s even any gold in the ground.
And offcourse, they’re not alone. Look at Microsoft. They beat expectations too, but their stock also dipped because they're caught in the same vortex, with capex jumping 74% to nearly $35 billion. It’s a collective panic. An arms race where the only goal is to spend more than the other guy, with no clear definition of what "winning" even looks like for the user, or the shareholder.
What are we, the actual users of these platforms, getting for this $72 billion? A slightly smarter algorithm that shows me ads for a product I already bought? An AI chatbot that can write a mediocre poem about my cat? My own electricity bill went up 15% last quarter, and I'm supposed to be excited that these companies are building data centers so vast they could power a small country, all for a future that feels more like a sci-fi fever dream than a tangible product.
They tell us this is all essential to secure a "bigger long-term opportunity." That's the line from the analysts, the line from the company. But what if it isn't? What if they're just burning through a decade of obscene profits because they're terrified of becoming irrelevant and have no better ideas? They expect us to believe this is all part of some grand 4D chess move, and honestly...
The stock drop tells you everything you need to know. For once, Wall Street looked at the magic trick and wasn't impressed. They looked past the "one-time" charge and saw the endless, terrifying bonfire of cash right behind it. They heard the promises of a glorious AI future and realized it ain't coming cheap, and it may not be coming at all.
It's Not an Investment, It's a Tithe
At the end of the day, this isn't about building a better product. It's about appeasing the new gods of Silicon Valley: Growth and The Future. They're sacrificing present-day profit on the altar of a hypothetical tomorrow. Zuckerberg isn't a CEO anymore; he's the high priest of a very, very expensive cult, and he's asking his followers—shareholders—to tithe billions of dollars for a salvation that may never arrive. The gaslighting is in convincing everyone that this burning pyre of money is actually the warm glow of innovation. Don't believe it.