Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t afraid to make ‘risky’ bets. In 2021, he changed the name of the company from ‘Facebook’ to ‘Meta Platforms’ to demonstrate the company’s focus on building the metaverse. His significant investment in VR and other metaverse initiatives was a key factor in the company’s stock cratering below $90 per share in late 2022.
Today, Meta Platforms’ stock has rebounded to an all-time high. Its stock trades for $733.63 per share as of Friday’s close. The rebound has been driven by AI, with Meta seeing significant revenue contribution from AI in areas like keeping users more engaged and helping advertisers build more effective ads with AI tools. Yet, Zuckerberg continues raising the stakes on his AI bet. In the video below from the AI Investor Podcast, 24/7 Wall St. Analyst Eric Bleeker breaks down Zuckerberg’s all-in bet, which sees him trying to poach some of the most talented employees in the AI space for signing bonuses that can exceed $100 million per employee!
Key Points
Meta (NASDAQ: META) is aggressively ramping up AI efforts by investing $15 billion in Scale AI and personally recruiting a top-tier “super intelligence” team, signaling a strategic push to catch up in foundational model development.
With $65 billion in CapEx this year, all for internal use, Meta is now the most capital-intensive AI builder among consumer tech firms, despite lagging behind model leaders like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Zuckerberg’s personal involvement and massive compensation offers highlight Meta’s urgency to pivot from data-rich platform to a frontier AI innovator amid broader signs of industry acceleration.
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Watch Our Video on Mark Zuckerberg Going All-In on AI
Key Points on Meta Platforms’ AI Ambitions in 2025
Meta recently purchased 49% of ScaleAI for $15 billion The deal was essentially structured to avoid regulatory review and an ‘acqui-hire’ of Scale CEO Alexadr Wang.
Reports are also out that Meta is building a team of roughly 50 to 100 people for a ‘Super Intelligence Team’ – they’re being personally recruited by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg is extremely serious about this intiative, he’s reportedly personally reaching out to candidates and setting up inrterviews at his homes in San Francisco and Tahoe. Signing bonuses reportedly reach up to nine-figure packages!
Meta had a high-profile win this week when it signed up three OpenAI researchers – reportedly paying more than $100 million to each one – who were key parts of OpenAI’s reasoning team that made recent breakthroughs.
Despite Meta’s massive spend on AI – the company has guided to capex exceeding $65 billion this year and they’re not renting out compute capactiy to other companies like other hyperscalers – Meta is falling behind in the AI race.
Meta is currently pursuing two parallel paths in AI.
First: improving its products. To date, Meta has seen good ROI on adding AI to its services and this has led to a rebound in share price from $700 today.
This includes areas like AI in ad creative, AI in user engagement, and AI in chatbots for things like WhatsApp as a next revenue generator.
The key point is that ownership of data and having distribution are both more valuable than ever in an AI world. Meta is better set up than any company in those areas.
The second path in AI Meta is betting on is the overall race to ‘super intelligence.’
On that front, Meta is behind Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and likely even some Chinese companies like DeepSeek as well.
Meta doesn’t NEED to win this race for the stock to win in the near term. In fact, the high spending levels risk hurting the company’s stock in the near term.
Yet, it’s clear that Zuckerberg is all in on the race to ‘super intelligence’ – even if he has to spend $100 billion plus per year. Simply put: he’s betting his legacy on this.
Get All the Latest AI News from the AI Investor Podcast
This discussion was a segment on our most recent AI Investor Podcast. On this podcast, we follow the biggest stories in the space. Best of all: 24/7 Wall St. Analyst Eric Bleeker invests $500,000 of his own money on the top stock ideas in AI. That includes a recent buy of Meta Platforms!
You can listen to the most recent podcast on major podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify below. You can also listen on our YouTube channel, where new episodes are uploaded.
Transcript:
[00:00:05] Austin Smith: That’s actually a perfect transition to our next topic, which is Meta Platforms, you know, no company exemplifies that, that need in recent memory. Then Facebook for me. So Facebook now Meta, Facebook famously went public and traded below their IPO price for a number of months.
[00:00:19] Austin Smith: I think like significantly down on worries that they would not be able to monetize, get this mobile traffic, which is now absolutely laughable, right, with Instagram. And I mean the idea that Facebook wouldn’t be able to monetize mobile impressions as ludicrous today, but at the time. It was a really strong narrative and investors, you know, if you had waited for Facebook to prove that in, you missed out on hundreds or thousands percent returns since their IPO.
[00:00:45] Austin Smith: Um, but speaking of Facebook, you know, Zuckerberg always pushing forward, uh, you know, solved the mobile ad issue. Famously bought WhatsApp pushed forward into the Metaverse. AI is his new terrain where he really wants Facebook to win. He is personally recruiting for Super Intelligence via a company called Scale AI.
[00:01:03] Austin Smith: What’s going on here? This is kind of a big story. Um, lots of money being thrown around young talent, and from what I read about this, Zuckerberg is personally frustrated at the slow pace at Meta and getting involved in doing a lot of the recruiting himself.
[00:01:18] Eric Bleeker: Yeah, it’s a super fascinating story.
[00:01:19] Eric Bleeker: First of all, just one, one plug. I did appear on, Stock Club, which is a podcast this week. If, if you wanna download that, it’s kind of my broad thoughts on the AI space. And I talked about, uh, Meta and how that fits in as an AI company. One of the points I made on that podcast was essentially, if you go back and you look at, we had that, um, belief that.
[00:01:44] Eric Bleeker: Meta or Facebook at the time would be unable to monetize Mobile turned into a generational opportunity. If you look at Meta’s bottom at the end of 2022, when it went down to like $80 a share, that was within weeks of the release of ChatGPT. That famous, uh, moment that kind of changed the inflection point of AI.
[00:02:04] Eric Bleeker: And since then they’re back to $700. So, you know, just kind of a, a storyline you don’t hear much about, but this is a company. That has transformed thanks to AI. But yeah, the story is they spent, I believe it was $15 billion buying a 49% stake in a company named Scale AI. It, it is basically an acquihire of their CEO to get around kind of limits and antitrust that’s happening right now.
[00:03:21] Eric Bleeker: That’s the most aggressive company, because while Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) might be spending a hundred billion or more on CapEx, they’re renting it out. For cloud computing, Amazon’s, or sorry, Meta’s using this all internally. So we’ve, we’ve talked about Meta, it’s a company that we own in the portfolio and you’ve got two sides to kind of this AI puzzle.
[00:04:26] Eric Bleeker: Which is actually building the models themselves and in this race to be in leadership on that front. They’re behind Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), they’re behind OpenAI, they’re behind Anthropic, they’re behind xAI. They’re probably behind DeepSeek and some other competitors. So what’s going on right now is Zuckerberg is just going all in and he’s plotting a path where Meta might be spending more than a hundred billion dollars a year.
[00:04:55] Eric Bleeker: But you know, Austin. Again, it’s, it’s, what’s the theme of this podcast? What’s the theme of the news across the past year that people were expecting this bubble to? Cool. But we previewed Oracle with eye popping numbers today. Zuckerberg doubling down, focusing on building a team that he’s paying people a hundred million dollars plus to form the basis of, we’ve talked about.
[00:05:22] Eric Bleeker: Other companies we’ve talked about Waymo. We’re gonna talk about things like Broadcom and our earnings, and it is the story that we were wondering if AI might see this deceleration, but point after point, after point goes towards potentially an acceleration, especially in the back half of 2026. So again, if you wrote one thing down.
[00:05:48] Eric Bleeker: From this podcast today, it’s it’s news point after News Point, all these data points pointing towards something inflecting right now, and it’s, it’s potentially very powerful if you’re an investor.
[00:06:01] Austin Smith: let’s move on to earnings because of course the truth is gonna be in the data here.
[00:06:04] Austin Smith: And I remember in mid 24 there were, there were similar points about, you know, which is what you’re alluding to, of course, that AI would reach these points where it was like impractical to use and it would slow down. And you had also alluded to some air pockets as a potential. But what we’re actually seeing, earnings might be a little different.
[00:06:22] Austin Smith: And one of the things that I would just remind people as, as you’re thinking about investing in new trends and sectors like this as technology becomes more affordable, it proliferates more broadly. Right. It’s kind of related to Jevons paradox a little bit, right? Like as cost per compute goes down, as cost per token goes down, as applications become more, you know, cost effective, there are more places you can inject it.
[00:06:45] Austin Smith: So long term, oh yeah. That’s all we are gonna see is a, an increase in usage here.
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