Meta Will Issue Non-Voting Shares to Pay for the AI Race: It Wants the Money, It Won't Share Control

Meta has come up with a new way to pay for the AI race: shares you pay with, but don't vote with. Chief financial officer Susan Li confirmed at the third-quarter results that the company will create "a new class of non-voting capital stock," to be distributed to all existing shareholders as a stock dividend.

Li listed the purpose without much embellishment: raising capital, employee pay, acquiring companies and "general corporate purposes." All of it without touching the voting power of existing Class A and B shareholders, in other words preserving the "founder-led" structure, as she put it. Translation: money from outside is welcome, opinions on how it gets spent - not.

The numbers explain why a new kitty is needed. Revenue in the quarter came to 64 billion dollars, 26 percent more than a year ago and above Wall Street's expectations. But costs and expenses jumped by 68 percent. When costs grow more than twice as fast as revenue, the coffers need new sources, and Li talks openly about the "unprecedented momentum" AI is bringing to every part of the business.

Reality Labs, the division for augmented reality glasses and VR headsets, keeps losing money, just less than before. The company expects losses to fall from 2025 levels to 18 to 19 billion dollars. That's the price of the previous "future" Meta spent years buying, before AI became the main story.

Mark Zuckerberg claims the new investments are already paying off. "In just a month and a half, more than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set up personal Muse agents," he said, adding that the app had been number one on the App Store "almost every day." According to him, Muse is now entering an expansion phase, with the goal of one day serving "billions of people." From ten million to billions is a long road, and part of that road will be financed by shareholders without a vote.

There are clouds Li mentioned herself. The company is monitoring legal and regulatory cases that "could significantly affect" its business, and in the coming months several trials related to children and young people await it in the US. Will investors buy non-voting shares from a company that is at the same time going to court over how it treated underage users? Judging by the numbers so far - probably yes.