Increasingly, Meta has been using debt to fuel its spending, amassing $59 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet by the end of 2025, double the prior year’s total. And that doesn’t count the “aggressive” accounting it has used to keep the cost of a $27 billion Louisiana data center off its books. “The spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable,” The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” columnist Asa Fitch wrote this week.
Now, as the company careens from one staggeringly expensive misadventure to another, its cash-cow core business is starting to wear out. Last quarter, the number of daily active users across its properties declined for the first time to 3.56 billion from 3.58 billion.
Honestly, I think it’s massively significant. For a start off, that’s 20 million people, the population of Chile, in one quarter. That’s a lot of people regardless of how you slice it.
But more to the point, Meta services - Facebook especially - have reached a point of cultural impact where anyone who doesn’t have them can’t be talked into getting them anyway. Plus, they’re useful messaging services too, because everyone else uses them. Their popularity has become self-fulfilling. The idea of Meta losing more users than it’s gaining at all has been frankly unthinkable until recently.
It’s a lot of people but big tech can easily get back those numbers.
Let’s see how the tendency unrolls over the long-term.