Meta's AI gamble is suddenly looking like a win for Mark Zuckerberg.
That was far from a given. Even the Meta CEO was doubting himself. His company had poured hundreds of billions of dollars into AI investments with largely unproven results.
"Are you sure this is going to work?" he asked his 29-year-old AI chief, Alexandr Wang, at the end of last year, he recalled on a recent episode of the "Cheeky Pint" podcast.
Those risky AI bets — which one analyst compared to throwing spaghetti at the wall — as well as the massive layoffs and reorganization that came with them, are now starting to pay off. Meta beat its AI rivals to the punch with its new AI assistant, Muse, and it finally released a frontier AI model. Although Muse is bleeding cash amid high compute costs, analysts are excited by its moneymaking potential.
Zuckerberg is riding high, too. Sipping a Guinness alongside Wang during a recent podcast interview, the pair extolled Meta's AI prowess.
"You never know when you launch something how it's going to be received," the CEO said. "There's always the case where you get a home run, which in this case it was, right? And it's just like extremely well received right off the bat."
And Meta seems to believe in Zuckerberg's leadership more than ever. His latest coup: Convincing the company to issue a new class of shares after he threatened to list his Palo Alto compound and leave California as voters weigh a billionaire tax.
The big question is how long the good vibes will last. Meta is still spending gobs of money on AI without a concrete financial payoff. Some remain skeptical.
"The bill is huge," David Wagner, a portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, told Business Insider.
"He's won the narrative. He hasn't proven the return yet."
Meta's social reckoning era
Zuckerberg is no stranger to public discourse. He's undertaken multiple personas: the nerdy wunderkind in hoodies, the jacked wife guy, the unapologetically masculine Trump ally.
At the beginning of this year, it looked as if he was headed for a new reckoning, and it wasn't just because of the aptly named sequel to "The Social Network."
Zuckerberg was on trial, taking the stand in a landmark lawsuit that alleged Meta's platforms harmed the mental health of young people. (Meta was found negligent and is appealing.) It was one of three major lawsuits this year that put the company on the defensive against claims that its technology posed safety risks to children.
In February, Mark Zuckerberg appeared at a Los Angeles courthouse to defend the company in a landmark social media addiction trial.
Jon Putman/Anadolu via Getty Images
And there were the more typical Zuckerberg cringe moments, too, like his front-row appearance at a Prada fashion show that raised eyebrows across the internet.
On the inside, employee morale was waning. Though the billionaire CEO had called 2026 "the year of AI," Meta had little momentum, and unpopular decisions — including a program to track employee keystrokes — amplified the discontent.
Also, Meta had one of its largest rounds of layoffs, ever. Meta began trimming staff in March, followed by a huge round in May, when it laid off about 10% of its workforce.
Separately, Meta reshuffled another 7,000 workers as part of an AI-focused reorganization of its tech and product teams. Many engineers were relegated to individual contributor status. Meta later asked some of the employees it had demoted to return to their managerial roles.
The AI push didn't seem to be paying off: In the second quarter of this year, 98% of revenue came from its traditional advertising business — not AI.
Morale was "maybe not the worst it's ever been in 20 years here, but it's probably up there," Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, said during an internal call in June.
The groundwork for Meta's comeback
Amid the chaos, Zuckerberg laid the groundwork for a comeback. Wang and Meta's elite AI researchers moved their desks to sit near Zuckerberg.
Starting last year, Zuckerberg and Wang also went on a talent-hiring spree, dangling pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars to poach top researchers.
Zuckerberg empowered key lieutenants, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, to go ham on any vision they had, including on his pet project, an AI assistant. It all fit into Zuckerberg's longtime playbook of embracing small teams and overseeing reorgs until something works — move fast and break things, as he has infamously put it.
It worked.
Muse, the long-awaited Meta AI agent, became a breakout hit. A week after it launched, it shot to the top of the app store, and has since achieved more than 10 million downloads in North America. The team was stunned to have beaten OpenAI to market, a person familiar with the matter said. OpenAI's rival product, Dots, launched three weeks later.
Jolly is the mascot for Meta's Muse AI agent, which launched successfully last month.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Meta also threw unprecedented compute and talent at building a series of frontier AI models, called Muse Wonder, that could keep up with those from giants like OpenAI and Anthropic.
On Meta's third-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg was optimistic that Meta's AI and hardware investments could soon become cash cows, as people shop through Muse and buy more virtual-reality glasses powered by the company's growing AI chops.
Meta, meanwhile, views Zuckerberg as more critical than ever to its long-term fortunes.
Key board members abruptly excused themselves from a dinner with Zuckerberg in September after he told them he was going to sell his Palo Alto estate in response to California's proposed billionaire tax, Meta disclosed in a filing on Wednesday.
Four days later, a special committee returned with a deal that would give Zuckerberg $20 billion in "immediate liquidity" to cover the tax — if it passes — without reducing his controlling stake in Meta. Meta also made plans to ensure that billions in fresh AI fundraising wouldn't dilute Zuckerberg's control.
"Meta's track record of significant value creation for its shareholders is in large part due to his strong leadership, unique and creative vision, and exceptional management abilities," the company said in a press release.
The personal win comes as some of his other problems have blown over. Meta settled a major lawsuit brought by attorneys general across states, Washington, DC, and US territories. As part of the settlement, the company committed to make changes to its apps, such as daily time limits and pausing notifications overnight. The agreement was part of an August settlement, a move that allowed Meta to call out its competitors such as YouTube and TikTok.
"All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another," the company said in a blog post at the time.
Big questions still loom. The day after Meta reported strong earnings and Muse adoption, its stock fell 7% as investors absorbed the scale of the company's hundreds of billions of dollars in future spending commitments.
And the legal troubles keep on coming. This week, a New Mexico jury also ordered Meta to pay a staggering $25 billion over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a case that Meta plans to appeal.
Whether Zuckerberg's strategy is sustainable or not, the vibe shift has been notable — and may have proven naysayers wrong, at least until the next period of chaos erupts.
"Meta is cool again," Jesse Cohen, an analyst at Investing.com, said in a note. "That's the Muse effect."
Meta's board wants its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to stick around — and stay local.
Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images
Meta is offering CEO Mark Zuckerberg a $20 billion stock deal to keep him close to its headquarters.
The move speaks to a common belief that the best work happens when everyone is together in person.
Research suggests companies with far-flung CEOs pay a price for that distance.
Meta wants more than rank-and-file employees at the office. It wants CEO Mark Zuckerberg there, too — even if that comes at a hefty price.
The tech giant's board said in a securities filing Wednesday that it would create a new class of non-voting stock in part to keep Zuckerberg in control and give him a financial incentive to continue living near its headquarters. It described his presence at the office as "critically important" to its future success. Meta has required employees to come in at least three days a week since 2023.
Zuckerberg previously told the board he was considering moving in response to a proposed California billionaire tax. The stock deal would give the CEO $20 billion in "immediate liquidity" to cover the tax by selling stock without losing control of Meta, the filing said.
That arrangement carries particular weight at Meta, where Zuckerberg is leading the company's AI push. It also speaks to a common belief that has driven return-to-office mandates: The best work happens when people — including senior leaders — are physically together.
Staying local
Cole Rubin, cofounder of sports technology company FanFeed, said CEOs and other execs are sending a message to employees by physically working alongside them.
"You're not going to question why you're working long hours if you actually can see the leader doing the same," Rubin told Business Insider.
Having bosses in the office can also help a company move faster when unexpected opportunities arise, he said. Employees can walk into a leader's office, get an immediate answer, and act before the moment passes.
"It's not the scheduled calls where the magic happens," Rubin said. "When you have the decision-maker there, it gives people a lot of freedom to be able to feel heard."
A leader's presence is especially important during crises, said Bill George, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, a medical-technology company. Being together lets executives quickly assess what has happened, gauge employees' reactions, and decide on a course of action.
"We've got to really feel what's going on emotionally, and we actually physically have to discuss it," he said.
George also noted that RTO demands placed on workers can ring hollow if the CEO doesn't follow them. "You've got to be there if your employees are there," he said.
Long-distance tradeoffs
Meta wouldn't have been the first company with a long-distance CEO if Zuckerberg had opted to leave the Golden State.
Brian Niccol was living in California when he was named CEO of Seattle-based Starbucks in 2024. The coffee chain had agreed as part of his hiring package not to require him to relocate. Later, it built a 4,624-square-foot satellite office five minutes from his home so he could work alongside colleagues, Business Insider first reported. Niccol has since purchased a property in Seattle.
Companies with long-distance CEOs don't perform as well on average as those with leaders on-site, according to a 2025 study by Boston College and Arizona State. They also have lower valuations and worse insider reviews, the findings show.
Meta's decision to woo Zuckerberg to stay in California was made by a special committee on its board, which said it was informed by challenges the company faced when he couldn't be physically present with management during the pandemic.
The committee said it didn't want Meta "to face similar challenges going forward."
Amid renewed speculation about an early General Election, now is the time to look at whom to put money on as the next party leaders, says Mark Littlewood in his latest Political Betting column for the Daily Sceptic.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has apparently started to realize that the ruling conservative New Democracy party will hardly manage to achieve the necessary 30+% of the votes in the upcoming elections and secure a majority government like in the last two parliamentary votes. Over the weekend, PM Mitsotakis made clear if the election result […]
China’s nomination of Chinese national Song Li to lead the World Health Organization has been filed under the wrong heading. Most of the coverage treats it as a chapter in a bigger story: Washington has walked out, Beijing has stepped in and Geneva must now pick a side. That story is tidy. It is also […]
The Belgian federal government has nominated Hans Kluge (pictured) for the position of Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO).
“I am very honoured by the trust Belgium has placed in me and am grateful for the opportunity to take on this important responsibility,” Kluge said on X. “Serving the WHO has been the greatest privilege of my professional life.”
Kluge has served as WHO Regional Director for Europe since 2020 and began a second term in February 2025. Under WHO rules, he will step aside as WHO/Europe Director while campaigning for the role, a process that involves lobbying member states, NGOs and the organisation's largest funders.
Tried and tested After qualifying as a doctor in Belgium, he began his international career with Médecins Sans Frontières in conflict settings in Liberia and Somalia. He subsequently coordinated tuberculosis programmes in Siberian prisons and across the former Soviet Union.
Kluge joined WHO in 1999, initially working on tuberculosis and HIV in...
Login
