Meta’s quarter had all the hallmarks of a classic Zuckerbot special… big beats, bigger spending, and an even bigger tax bill that’d make TurboTax spontaneously combust.

For starters, revenue came in at $51.24 billion… a 26% jump year-over-year, topping expectations of $49.41B (nods head in approval). And earnings overall were technically a beat at $7.25 per share (vs. $6.69 expected)… but that didn’t matter, because lurking beneath the numbers was a $15.93 billion one-time tax charge, courtesy of President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

If you’re wondering how bad Mr. Market views it… pretty bad actually, Zuck is getting dumped into the ditch (Meta’s stock is down 10%... and counting). Of course, Uncle Sam reaching into the pot and taking 30% of Meta’s revenue is bad enough on it’s own… but there’s another piece to the puzzle that makes it even worse. 

(Source: Investopedia)

You see, while most tech CEOs are busy finding “efficiencies” (translation: layoffs), Zuck’s out here collecting AI companies like I used to collect baseball cards. He’s poured $14.3B into Scale AI, hired its CEO as Meta’s new Chief AI Officer, and broke ground on a $1.5B data center in El Paso, TX. Oh, and he also signed a $27B financing deal with Blue Owl Capital for a hyper-scale facility in Louisiana.

CFO (Cash Fire Officer) Susan Li said the quiet part out loud: “Our current expectation is that capital expenditures dollar growth will be notably larger in 2026 than 2025.” Translation: “Zuck and I have an AI addiction, and we ain’t going to therapy.”

When you add it all up, Meta raised its 2025 capex forecast to $70-72B, up from $66-72B. And the party doesn’t stop there… total expenses for the year got bumped up to $116-118B, up $2B from prior guidance. When asked why, Zuck robotically muttered, “AI go brrr” (while a server farm burst into flames behind him).

Yes, Meta’s Reality Labs (the headset and glasses division) lost $4.4B this quarter on just $470M in sales. Oh and the Quest lineup ain’t doing numbers, but their new $799 Ray-Ban Display glasses are apparently sold out through November. Zuckerberg swears they’re the future of AI hardware.

Analysts however, aren’t convinced. Futurum’s Olivier Blanchard said Meta “still doesn’t understand what kinds of problems their products should solve.” That’s French for: “You’re making expensive toys.”

But credit where it’s due, the Zuckerverse keeps multiplying like neighborhood cats… Meta now boasts 3.54 billion daily active people, beating Wall Street’s 3.5B estimate, and ad revenue came in at a thicc $50.08 billion (95% of that is probably boomers scrolling through fake AI reels that they swear are real).

But while Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are trying to sell AI to the world, Meta’s just feeding it into the ad machine… to make you buy that same Stanley cup again because you might have looked at one six months ago. Zuck insists the spending will pay off “over some period.” Probably the same period it takes for him to beat Apple in mixed reality… so, roughly never.

But hey, even with the 10% dump, the company’s still up 25% and things are looking good. Still, if you’re a shareholder, don’t expect Zuck’s AI addiction to produce any cash for at least the next five years.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Meta, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft as mentioned in the article.