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.
I’m still waiting for that company to actually die. From what I can tell, Yi Long Ma has spun it into one of his other companies and spun that company into SpaceX. And he’s milked the AI thing. I used to laugh wondering where he’d get the 40 billion to pay off Ellison and the rest of the funders who actually paid for Twitter. The sad truth is he can find 40 billion in his couch cushions, but won’t even have to because he’ll book-cook his way out of it.
Yeah, I can’t wait for the tell-all book that someone inevitably releases in 20 years about how Xwitter was a complete ghost town propped up by sports and racism. The company is clearly hemorrhaging money like a firehose.