Meta reported better-than-expected revenue in its third-quarter earnings report on Wednesday and issued strong guidance for the current period. The stock rose about 2.5% in extended trading.
It's not clear if earnings were comparable to the $5.75 per share expected by analysts.
Revenue jumped 26% from a year ago.
"We hit major milestones this quarter toward delivering personal superintelligence for everyone - including launching Muse and Muse Wonder, our first frontier model," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the earnings release.
For the fourth quarter, Meta said it expects revenue of between $73 billion and $76 billion, or $74.5 billion at the middle of the range. Analysts expected $73.73 billion, according to LSEG.
The initial success of the Muse AI personal assistant tool that debuted in September helped Meta end September with its best month on Wall Street since 2022.
Meta isn't the first to create a digital assistant that can organize people's email and scan the web for headphone deals, but the company's empire, which includes Facebook and Instagram, has helped introduce AI agents to the masses. At the same time, Meta and its AI chief Alexandr Wang have continued rolling out new foundation models and related updates at a speedy clip, including Muse Wonder , which was released last Monday.
Mark Zuckerberg is not a fan of California's Proposition 40, otherwise known as the "California Wealth Tax."
Meta said its CEO could leave California if that statewide ballot measure becomes law. Zuckerberg "could become liable for a significant, multi-billion-dollar tax payment based on his ownership of stock in the Company," a Meta SEC filing said.
Meta was able to convince Zuckerberg to stay in California by offering the new stock plan, the filing noted.
The filing explains that Zuckerberg committed to remaining in California (or any other jurisdiction in which the Company maintains its corporate headquarters) for eight years, "unless there are material unforeseen circumstances that would render it prudent or advisable for Mr. Zuckerberg to reside elsewhere."
Zuckerberg said that for now, Meta's main enterprise push will center on the company's efforts charging developers access to its proprietary foundation models and Muse Code AI agent .
Eventually, Zuckerberg says, the aim is to create "a whole kind of business network of Muse agents" that's focused on "small businesses."
Then Meta will aim for "making a version of Muse that people can bring into different corporate environments and work there," the Facebook co-founder said.
Meta finance chief Susan Li told analysts during the earnings call that the company's workforce shrank 12% quarter-on-quarter to 66,000 employees. The decline follows big layoffs Meta conducted over the summer that affected about 10% of the company's workforce, equating to around 8,000 jobs.
Zuckerberg told analysts during an earnings call that over 10 million people in the U.S. and Cananda "have set up Muse personal agents" over the past month and a half.
"Engagement and retention are also off to a strong start," Zuckerberg said. Roughly 25% of people who have set up Muse are using it "on any given day."
"For our earliest adopters, the longer that they use Muse, the better that retention seems to get," Zuckerberg said, later adding that the biggest AI agent use case is shopping.
"More than a quarter of people who are using Muse engaging in this with an average purchase size of over $200," Zuckerberg said.
Meta Reality Labs has notched another quarter of big losses.
That VR and AI-device unit posted $443 million in third-quarter sales while generating $4.13 billion in losses. Analysts polled by StreetAccount were expecting the division to report $513 million in revenue for the quarter while logging a loss of $4.54 billion.
Meta revealed that it will create a new class of non-voting Class C common stock, which will take effect in Jan. 2027.
That stock will be distributed to all existing shareholders via a dividend, and it's effectively a two-for-one stock split that will begin trading in the new year.
Meta said that that new class of common stock is intended to "provide Meta the ability to finance its growth and help the company remain a leader among fierce competition both domestic and international." The company added that this new class of common stock "will continue the founder-led model that has driven the company's success since its inception."
"We have also entered into a Founder Alignment Agreement with Mr. Zuckerberg, which has terms related to his sales of Class C common stock received in the stock dividend, his service at the company, and conditions for potential future stock dividends of Class C common stock," the company said in an earnings release.
Meta has narrowed the range for its full-year data center-related capital expenditures, or capex, to come in between $135 billion to $145 billion. That figure was previously $130 billion to $145 billion
Analysts were expecting capex to come in at $138.27 for the year.
Wall Street is monitoring Meta's capex spending as the company further develops the underlying computing infrastructure needed to power AI agents and foundation models.
Meta's third-quarter daily active people, or DAP, came in at 3.64 billion, trailing the 3.65 billion that analysts were expecting, according to StreetAccount. That figure represents all of Meta's users across its family of apps like Facebook and Instagram.
Meta said that it expects fourth-quarter revenue guidance to come between $73 billion to $76 billion. That range's midpoint is above analyst estimates of $73.73 billion.
Since Zuckerberg spent billions of dollars overhauling the company's AI unit and placed Wang as the division's leader some 14 months ago, analysts at Baird Equity Research have noticed increased "positive sentiment" from investors, according to a Tuesday note that cited optimism over the Muse AI agents and related technologies.
Investors have questioned why Meta needs to spend that much money on data centers when it doesn't have a cloud computing business like rivals Google and Amazon. Wall Street may be more willing to cut the social network some slack because of its recent AI momentum.
As such, our ad checks are generally positive for Meta, and we expect an in-line Q3 report; we believe the street is better-informed on capex/margin pressures, and we believe a scenario where Meta raises capex guidance (2026/2027) could be received more positively (or less negatively) by investors now that the company is demonstrating a clearer ROI, despite the lack of a cloud platform.
Meta is offering $20 and $100 monthly subscription plans for Muse AI agent power users. Right now, Muse is free to use but requires a subscription to run it with Meta's latest model — Muse Wonder . The company is also charging developers $50 or $200 a month to access its most powerful Muse Wonder Full AI model via the Muse coding agent that debuted in early August.
Meta's nascent subscription efforts represent opportunities for the company to expand beyond online advertising , which is still its core money maker. Investors have been concerned about the Facebook parent's hefty AI investments relative to rivals like Alphabet and Amazon that have cloud computing businesses .
While AI-specific monetization efforts offer hope of diversification, they remains a longer-term play. Last week, Meta teamed up with longtime rival Apple to make Meta's new open-weight AI model work with the iPhone maker's high-end Mac computers. Unlike Meta's proprietary AI models, coders can download the weights of Muse Spark Open for free .
Meta is betting that developers who try Muse Spark Open may eventually want to pay to access the company's more powerful proprietary AI systems.
"These aren't the most capable models that we've developed or released," Wang said in an interview with CNBC. "But we think that there will be a lot of companies and developers who sort of use this model and tinker with it at small scale and then seek to ramp up and scale up their usage."
Meta's Reality Labs division, which is tasked with developing virtual reality headsets and AI-powered wearable devices, is expected to post a loss of $4.54 billion while generating $513 million in sales for the third quarter, according to StreetAccount.
In July when Meta reported second-quarter earnings , the company revealed that the Reality Labs unit lost $4.62 billion while bringing in $431 million during the period.
With the VR market struggling to catch on with consumers , Zuckerberg has since shifted Reality Labs resources to center on more on AI-driven hardware products like the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses the company creates with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica .
Still, Zuckerberg hasn't completely abandoned VR and its sibling technology augmented reality. The CEO revealed in September during the company's annual Connect conference for developers the Meta VR Glasses , which will cost $1,299 then they are released in the spring of 2027.
"We have built a new kind of VR device that delivers the same magical feeling of presence and immersion, high-resolution displays and views of the world around you in a form factor that is a pair of glasses for the first time," Zuckerberg said at the time.
Wall Street may be pleased that Meta's AI strategy involves subscription pushes and potential new revenue opportunities , but it will take a while before those efforts pay off. Until then, the company's massive online advertising business continues to be its financial anchor.
Meta is expected to report third-quarter advertising revenue of $61.87 billion. The social media giant said in July that it posted $59.36 billion in second-quarter ad sales.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal from nearly a decade ago continues to haunt Zuckerberg and his social media empire.
New Mexico district court judge Francis Mathew imposed a $25 billion penalty on Meta today over a state data privacy case that derived from 2018 privacy revelations. The fine, revealed in a court filing, came after a jury in a Santa Fe courthouse determined that the company formally known as Facebook should be held liable for misleading New Mexico residents about its data handling practices and methods to prevent harmful information from spreading on its family of apps.
Although New Mexico was awarded $219.5 billion, based on the social media company committing over 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices act, the judge reduced that figure to $25 billion.
"Facebook did not conduct the comprehensive investigation that it promised" following the Cambridge Analytica revelations, judge Mathew wrote in the filing, regarding the company's then pledge to examine the "data misuse."
Analysts at Bank of America wrote in a note published Friday that they expect Meta to post a sales beat, with revenue of $63.8 billion, based in part on the firm's "solid ad checks" with brands and companies that helps determine the health of the digital ad market.
The analysts don't expect Muse to contribute significantly to Meta's overall business for the rest of this year and 2027 and instead "will consume capacity w/o near-term revs.," meaning that the company's AI agent efforts will take some time to grow into something bigger.
Morgan Stanley analysts agree that Meta's Muse AI agent initiatives won't generate big sales anytime soon, and while they said in a Sunday research note that they are "bullish," they "encourage investors to keep reasonable adoption rates in perspective."
The analysts explained that it takes a long time for new technology habits and behaviors to normalize. In 2000, when the e-commerce boom was just five years deep, for instance, the analysts noted that online retail "only made up 4% of adj retail sales" while adding that "even ~30 years in ('26) it's still only 28%."
Meta will be the first hyperscaler to reveal quarterly financials during this tech earnings cycle, with Alphabet , Microsoft and Amazon slated to report next week.
The four companies combined have called for roughly $730 billion in capital expenditures this year as they stock up on graphics processing units and AI systems and look to build massive data centers around the globe .
Analysts polled by FactSet expect that number to hit around $1 trillion next year, led by Alphabet, which is projected to spend over $310 billion. The stepped up spending comes as interest rates soar and concerns intensify that AI revenue won't justify the costs.
Alphabet and Microsoft are scheduled to report earnings next Wednesday, followed by Amazon on Thursday.
Meta's past quarter wasn't all AI agents and good vibes.
The social media giant agreed in August to pay nearly $17 billion to settle a major lawsuit involving a group of state attorneys general, including California's Rob Bonta. The trial centered around allegations that Meta misled the public about the true scope of child mental health related harms caused by certain design elements of apps like Facebook and Instagram , including recommendation algorithms.
Meta's state AG settlement could cause the company to miss on third-quarter earnings per share due to the related $10 billion legal charge that "the street has not yet accounted for," Wolfe Research analysts wrote in a Monday note.
The company still faces numerous personal injury claims and a separate federal case involving a group of nationwide school districts that also focus on allegations that apps like Instagram have had detrimental effects on the well being of children.
