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.
The main question I have is this: is it going to be replaced by something better (such as federated services)?
Or will this just mean the Internet as a whole will lose lots of users? That, I think, wouldn’t be desirable. Whatever one may think of Meta, they’ve definitely done a lot to popularize the Internet as a mainstream technology, which by itself is a good thing, though if they use Meta platforms, it ought to be only the first step.