Meta is preparing to create a new class of non-voting stock as it pours resources into artificial intelligence. The company confirmed the plan on Wednesday during its third-quarter earnings call, after Semafor reported earlier that day that such an issuance was under consideration.
Chief financial officer Susan Li said Meta intends to "create a new class of non-voting capital stock, which will be distributed to all existing shareholders through a stock dividend." Non-voting shares do not give their owners a say in company decisions.
Li said the shares were designed to be a publicly traded, non-voting stock that Meta can use for "capital raising, employee compensation, acquisitions, and other general corporate purposes while preserving the voting power of existing Class A and B shareholders." She added that the structure lets the company keep its "founder-led structure" and widens its funding options, giving it flexibility to invest behind what she called "unprecedented momentum we're seeing across every part of our business, driven by AI."
The announcement came alongside a strong quarter that beat Wall Street expectations. Meta reported $64 billion in revenue, up 26% from a year earlier. Costs and expenses grew faster, however, rising 68% year over year.
Reality Labs, the unit behind Meta's augmented-reality glasses, virtual-reality headsets and VR software, is still losing money, though at a lower rate than before. In its earnings report, the company said it expects the division's losses to narrow from 2025 levels to between $18 billion and $19 billion.
Meta has expanded its AI lineup considerably over the past year. Earlier this year it released models including Muse Spark and Muse Glimmer. More recently it added Muse Wonder and Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model whose underlying parameters are publicly available for others to use and build on. The company also launched Muse Code, a coding agent for software developers. At its Meta Connect event, it unveiled a line of cute, cuddly avatars for its Meta Muse AI assistant, an effort to make the service more relatable.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said those products are gaining traction. "In just a month and a half, more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada have set up Muse personal agents," he said, adding that growth remains strong and that the app has been number one in the App Store almost every day.
Zuckerberg said Muse now has "clear product-market fit" and that Meta is entering "a new and more operational phase that is focused on scaling it." He later said the company expects the product's appeal to grow to eventually "serve billions of people."
Li also flagged risks ahead. "We continue to monitor active legal and regulatory matters that could significantly impact our business and financial results," she said, noting continued scrutiny on youth-related issues in several markets and a number of youth-related trials scheduled in the United States in the coming months.
