Meta Platforms, Inc.

Meta Platforms, Inc. is an American technology company that owns and operates the world's largest social media and messaging platforms — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger — and sells digital advertising against the attention of roughly 3.4 billion monthly active users across its Family of Apps. In fiscal 2025, the company generated $201 billion in revenue and $60 billion in net income, making it the second-largest digital advertising business on earth after Google.

This is a story about an advertising franchise of unprecedented scale betting a material fraction of its cash flow on artificial intelligence infrastructure, with the explicit ambition of building what its founder calls "personal superintelligence" for billions of people. The core business is extraordinary: gross margins above 80%, revenue growing at 22% in the most recent fiscal year, and a user base that covers nearly half the planet's population. But the investment required to sustain this trajectory is equally extraordinary — capex of $70 billion in FY2025, guided to $125–145 billion in FY2026, with no indication of a near-term peak. The file turns on a single question: whether the AI investments Meta is making will widen the moat around its advertising business or simply raise the cost of defending it.