Shane Williams

If you're long META, you gotta have your head examined. Meta has the worst capital-allocation record of any major American technology company over the past decade. Not one of the worst. The worst. And the reason is simple: Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Meta isn’t really a public company. Yes, the public owns most of the economic interests, but it doesn’t have any actual control. Zuckerberg has retained complete control over the company through super voting stock. Nobody can stop him. That might have been a good idea if Zuck was Steve Jobs. But he isn’t. Instead, he’s proven to be the very worst CEO in tech. Especially when it comes to capital allocation. In October 2021, Zuckerberg changed the company's name from Facebook to Meta Platforms and staked its future on something no one had ever heard of… and no one has ever used: the “metaverse.” Since then, Meta’s Reality Labs segment has produced roughly $13 billion of cumulative revenue against roughly $88 billion of cumulative operating losses. That is $88 billion of shareholder money that vaporized on Oculus headsets, Horizon Worlds, and augmented reality (“AR”) glasses. And what’s even worse is that the losses continue to accelerate. Reality Labs lost: 2019: $4.5 billion 2020: $6.6 billion 2021: $10.2 billion 2022: $13.7 billion 2023: $16.1 billion 2024: $17.7 billion 2025: $19.2 billion And these losses aren’t the only massive errors in judgment. In 2021, with the stock at an average price of $323, Meta spent $44.5 billion buying back its own shares. The next year, the stock fell to $93 per share. Had Meta simply waited one year, the same $44.5 billion would have retired an additional 118 million shares. At today's price, that is another $65 billion of value transferred from continuing shareholders to selling shareholders – because management insisted on buying at the top. Add it up. Between the metaverse and the peak-price buyback, Meta destroyed roughly $150 billion of shareholder capital in a five-year window. And that is before you count the stock-based-compensation leak. The diluted share count only fell 11.6% despite $174 billion (!) of gross repurchases since 2017. No goodwill impairments. No board accountability. Zuckerberg's super voting stock makes sure of it. Which brings us to artificial intelligence (“AI”). Meta's 2025 capex was $69.7 billion – 34.7% of revenue. The most aggressive single-year capital investment in the company's history. But that’s not even half of the real spend. The real spending is being hidden in “off-balance-sheet” deals so big and so brazen they would make Enron blush. Here’s one example. Meta disclosed in its 2025 annual report a 20% interest in a Louisiana data-center venture formed in October 2025. Meta's maximum loss exposure: $45.95 billion. How could 20% of an entity formed less than a year ago be worth $250 billion? And wait, who really owns this data center? Meta's auditor, Ernst & Young, designated “accounting for a variable interest entity” – aka, this data center deal – a critical audit matter in the 2025 annual report. It said its determination of which entity was the primary beneficiary was “especially challenging due to the significant judgment required.” In other words… we think Meta is lying about this deal. Moody's, in a February 23, 2026, opinion, wrote that Meta's accounting “is not in line with the expected economics of this transaction,” called its disclosure “opaque,” and warned it stood ready to make a “quantitative debt adjustment.” You can't say that investors haven't been warned. You can't say Meta's management team hasn't shown you exactly how they waste tens of billions, every year. And you can't say the auditor and the rating agency haven't already flagged the off-balance-sheet structure. But it is extraordinary that investors have not yet begun to punish the stock and demand Zuck’s resignation. Just wait. They will.