Meta certainly do give the impression that they are burning through ridiculous amounts of cash with not much to show for it, and thats just from the outside.
Someone had a poster up of Pam "this is the same thing" on the one side had the apollo space missions, and the other a picture of Zuck avatar next to the Eiffel tower. At the top it had the current RL spend (something like 45billion) they like me working in RL.
there were three teams for everything, sometimes in the same org.
Take hand interactions for example.
There was production hand detection, they were in the OS/product team. They spent a lot of time trying to make sure it was reliable and useable.
Then there was a near research team, who took old state of the art and salmi sliced it until it worked well enough on either current or next gen hardware.
Then there was the production research people, who were derived from control labs, who for some reason were not in RL-research but buried deep in "production"
Then in RL-Research, the biggest org was agios, who also did hand interaction, but hardly any of their work actually made it near to prod. They liked wrist mounted cameras with no privacy systems, because why would you need it on your wrist? its not like those head mounted twats who spent two years trying to master privacy.
You also have to demonstrate "impact" every 6 months. which is really great when your delivery pipeline is 1-7 years.
How people put up with that kinda crap and continue to use these apps daily for hours on end is mind blowing to me.
But what is wrong in the meta situation is that while Meta officially projects its 2026 AI capital expenditures to be between $130 billion and $145 billion, investigative reports indicate its true future liabilities exceed $690 billion once unlisted back-end deals and lease commitments are factored in. They have used shadow accounting in many places to hide these things. As it's a publicly traded company so if that goes south it hits a lot of 401ks. So that in a nutshell is why its kinda a bad thing. But you are still kinda right in that its not an existential threat and it's not going to wipe Meta out even though those numbers could totally destroy the vast majority of public companies.
WSJ just needs to sound alarm bells so people keep paying for their crappy journalism, and thus everything they write becomes alarmist slop.
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/abad205...
pg47 of the 2Q26 10-Q, linked above.
Ultimately, the equity is really cheap even today on trailing numbers. ~12x EV/trailing EBITDA excluding-RL losses and still growing 25%-34% in each of the last 4 quarters organically at $200B+ of scale.
One of my pet peeves is that people who dont understand business forbid these companies from making investments or starting new businesses now or in the future. Meta has been sitting on $50-100b of cash on the balance sheet for years, and people lose their minds when they start to meaningfully invest it. I think theyve earned the right to diversify
The WSJ is a ghost of what it used to be.