How is it a bad thing if a company goes all in on burning cash but at the time have never reported a net loss quarter since its IPO? Its their money to burn at this point who cares
But what is wrong in the meta situation is that while Meta officially projects its 2026 AI capital expenditures to be between $130 billion and $145 billion, investigative reports indicate its true future liabilities exceed $690 billion once unlisted back-end deals and lease commitments are factored in. They have used shadow accounting in many places to hide these things. As it's a publicly traded company so if that goes south it hits a lot of 401ks. So that in a nutshell is why its kinda a bad thing. But you are still kinda right in that its not an existential threat and it's not going to wipe Meta out even though those numbers could totally destroy the vast majority of public companies.
WSJ just needs to sound alarm bells so people keep paying for their crappy journalism, and thus everything they write becomes alarmist slop.
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/abad205...
pg47 of the 2Q26 10-Q, linked above.
Ultimately, the equity is really cheap even today on trailing numbers. ~12x EV/trailing EBITDA excluding-RL losses and still growing 25%-34% in each of the last 4 quarters organically at $200B+ of scale.
One of my pet peeves is that people who dont understand business forbid these companies from making investments or starting new businesses now or in the future. Meta has been sitting on $50-100b of cash on the balance sheet for years, and people lose their minds when they start to meaningfully invest it. I think theyve earned the right to diversify
The WSJ is a ghost of what it used to be.