Meta is taking a big step forward in AI and creating a new type of actions that could help pay for it.
On Wednesday, as the company reported its third-quarter results, Semafor announced that the company might issue non-voting shares, that is, shares that do not give their owners the right to vote on company decisions, to help finance its push into artificial intelligence.
During Meta’s earnings call, the company confirmed this information. Meta Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said the company plans to “create a new class of non-voting share capital, which will be distributed to all existing shareholders as a stock dividend.”
Li later added that the company “created this new class of shares with the aim of creating publicly traded, non-voting shares usable for capital raising, employee compensation, acquisitions and other general corporate purposes while preserving the voting rights of existing Class A and B shareholders.”
The shares will allow the company to maintain its “current founder-led structure,” she added. They will also expand their “financing tools and give us the flexibility to invest as part of the unprecedented momentum we are seeing across all areas of our business, driven by AI.”
Meta’s earnings were strong in the most recent quarter, beating Wall Street expectations. The company reported revenue of $64 billion, an increase of 26% from the previous year. Its costs and expenses also increased, by 68% year over year.
Reality Labs, the division responsible for Meta’s AR glasses, VR headsets, and VR software, continues to lose money, although less than before. The company said in its earnings report that it expects the division’s losses to decline from their 2025 levels to between $18 billion and $19 billion.
Meta has taken a big step forward in AI over the past year. The company released several AI models including Muse Spark and Muse Glimmer earlier this year. In recent weeks, it has added Muse Wonder and Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model whose underlying parameters are publicly available for outsiders to use and be inspired by. 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 the AI assistant, Meta Muse, in an effort to make its AI services more accessible (and also memorable).
As far as we can tell, these AI products are doing well. “In just a month and a half, more than 10 million people in the United States and Canada have created personal agents for Muse,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the earnings conference call Wednesday. “Growth continues to be strong and we are number one on the App Store almost every day.”
“Now that Muse is clearly product-market fit, we’re moving into a new phase and a more operational phase focused on scaling it,” Zuckerberg added, later saying the company hoped to increase the product’s appeal to eventually “serve billions of people.”
The company also noted that some storm clouds linger on the horizon in the form of lingering regulatory and legal issues. “We continue to monitor active legal and regulatory matters that could have a material impact on our business and financial results,” Li said. “For example, we continue to see intense scrutiny of youth-related matters in several markets, and a number of youth-related trials are planned in the coming months in the United States. »
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