This is the 41st year for our annual Fastest-Growing Companies list, which ranks companies based on growth in revenue, profits, and stock returns.

100 Fastest-Growing Companies

Since 2017, Boston Consulting Group and Fortune have partnered to identify firms with long-term growth potential, screening more than 3,000 companies every year for their capacity to generate growth from within.

The Future 120

This ranking evaluates how Fortune 500 companies are deploying AI, and how technology leaders value those investments relative to industry peers.

Fortune AIQ 75

The companies on the Global 500 employ 70.2 million people, and their revenue represents more than one-third of the world’s GDP.

Fortune Global 500

With a combined revenue of $21 trillion and $2.1 trillion in profits, the 2026 Fortune 500 is the definitive list of America's largest companies.

Fortune 500

AI is a major force shaping this year’s list—but it’s far from the only story.

World's Most Admired Companies

Fortune AIQ 50

The corporations on our annual list of the world's 500 largest companies combined to generate $41.7 trillion in revenue over the past year.

Almost $20 trillion in revenue—and a record-breaking $1.87 trillion in profits. Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive list of the biggest companies in America.

Meta Platforms leaped eight spots to No.&nbsp;22 as its revenue rose 22% year over year, powered by advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Profits topped $62&nbsp;billion, even as Meta spent prodigiously on AI development.

The 300 companies on this year’s list brought in over $12.6 trillion in revenue for the latest 12 months, with the median revenue figure at $22 billion.

America's Most Innovative Companies

Leaders in all industries rely more than ever on Big Tech—and appreciate the giants that deliver, at scale, without drama.

These 50 companies exemplify the innovation, progress, and potential of AI.

AI Innovators 2025-Meta

Fortune 50 AI Innovators

The corporations on our annual list posted aggregate revenues of $41 trillion for the second year in a row.

Industries included in the sector are computers, internet services, IT services, semiconductors, and software companies.

Fortune Sector Leaders: Technology

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

The 26th edition of the list shows how much esteem Big Tech giants command among other business leaders.

The 25th Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies list suggests that tech giants’ peers respect them as much as ever.

The corporations on our annual list of the world’s largest companies delivered a record $41 trillion in aggregate revenues.

GLOBAL-500-2023-Meta-Platforms

The 300 companies on this list are transforming industries from the inside out.

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

F500 2023-Meta

The social media giant and metaverse pioneer formerly named Facebook posted a 1% decline in revenues in 2022, the first such decline in its history as a public company; it still brought in nearly $117 billion. 
<ul> 
 	<li>With a round of layoffs announced in late 2022 and another in spring 2023, Meta cut about 21,000 jobs, or roughly a quarter of its workforce. CEO Mark Zuckerberg described 2023 as a “year of efficiency” in which a leaner Meta can execute its highest priorities more quickly.</li> 
 	<li>Meta pivoted some of its attention and resources from the metaverse to generative A.I. In February 2023, the company announced an A.I. language model called LLaMA that it would use in its chatbots to compete with Google and Microsoft.</li> 
 	<li>In May 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission accused Meta’s core Facebook platform of violating an earlier agreement in which the company had pledged to protect the data of users of its Messenger Kids app. The FTC proposed modifying the agreement to forbid Meta from monetizing minors’ data in any way. The company strongly objected to the proposal, calling it a “political stunt.”</li> 
 	<li>Later in May, the European Union ordered Meta to stop sending Europeans’ personal data to the U.S., and imposed a $1.3 billion fine on the company for its past data transfers, which it said violated European privacy laws.</li> 
</ul>

Aggregate sales hit $37.8 trillion last year—an increase of 19%, the highest annual growth rate in the list’s history.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

F500 2022 Meta

The company formerly known as Facebook climbed seven spots on this year’s Fortune 500; its revenue grew 37.2% in 2021, to $118 billion, and it generated nearly $40 billion in profit. But the name change to Meta Platforms, announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in October 2021, is a sign of some of the challenges the company now faces. Meta Platforms’ core social media product, Facebook itself, saw its number of daily active users decline for the first time over the last three months of 2021. Meta also acknowledged that recent changes in privacy settings on Apple’s iOS apps were hurting Facebook’s ad-sales revenue. That changing landscape adds momentum to Meta’s new commitment to the metaverse, the digital and virtual world that Citi predicts will be worth $13 trillion in 2030. In December, Meta disclosed that it had already spent $10 billion on metaverse-related projects. The company admits those will take a long time to pay off, however, and Wall Street is concerned: The company’s share price fell almost 40% over the first four months of 2022.

Total revenue for the world’s biggest companies fell 4.8% to $31.7 trillion this year—the first decline in half a decade.

G500-2021-086-Facebook

Facebook, it appears, can’t be hurt—not by major ad buyers boycotting its service, not by state and federal investigations, and not even by a pandemic. Despite the impact of COVID-19 on its ad sales, Facebook impressed Wall Street all year by beating expectations. The company ended 2020 with almost $86 billion in revenues, up 22% year over year, and with $29 billion in profits, up nearly 58%. But Facebook faced major backlash for lax handling of hate on its service, including from former President Donald Trump, whom the service eventually barred after the U.S. Capitol riot. And this year, Facebook risks a big financial hit owing to Apple’s new privacy controls that let users limit tracking of their data.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

F500-2021-34-Facebook

Collectively, the ranked companies produced a three-year average shareholder return of 33%, vs. 19% for the S&P 500.

FGC-2021-Facebook

For an astounding 13th straight year, Apple claims the top spot in Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate reputation, based on a survey of almost 3,800 executives, directors, and analysts.

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $33.3 trillion in revenues and $2.1 trillion in profits.

G500-2020-144-Facebook

Facebook was the focus of increased government scrutiny in 2019. Regulators at the state, federal, and international level reviewed the ways the company has handled user data and permitted the dissemination of misinformation—investigations that sometimes led to hefty fines or other penalties. Despite the mounting heat, Facebook continued to rake in revenue in 2019. The company, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had $70.7 billion in sales, up nearly 27% from the previous year. But 2020 will be a particularly challenging one for Facebook as it tries to proactively remove misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic while policing bad actors on its platform during the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

Explore this year's ranking of the 50 companies with the best long-term growth potential.

Future-50-2020-Facebook

Last but not least, the social media player’s underlying business remains strong. And new business opportunities continue to emerge: A global e-commerce strategy (including WhatsApp Pay) shows signs of promise, for example. Analysts project 17% to 20% future, long-term growth. At the same time, reputational risk is high—as is the very real threat of regulatory crackdowns across different regions, including the United States. Perhaps even more ominous, the Facebook core product is seeing declining engagement levels with younger demographics. In short: There is a reason the social network is on this list, but also a reason it comes in at No. 50.

The Future 50

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-046-Facebook

Facebook was the focus of increased government scrutiny in 2019. Regulators at the state, federal, and international level reviewed the ways the company has handled user data and permitted the dissemination of misinformation—investigations that sometimes led to hefty fines or other penalties. But despite the mounting heat, Facebook continued to rake in revenue in 2019. The company, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had $70.7 billion in sales, up nearly 27% from the previous year, which helped it rise nearly a dozen ranks in the Fortune 500. But 2020 will be particularly challenging one for Facebook as it tries to proactively remove misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic while policing bad actors on its platform during the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

Collectively, the ranked companies produced a three-year average shareholder return of 19%, vs. 11% for the S&P 500.

Fastest Growing Companies 2020-52-Facebook

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2019 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $27.7 trillion in revenues and $1.5 trillion in profits.

Fortune's proprietary methodology allows us to zero in on the 50 global firms that are best poised to deliver—and continue delivering—above average gains.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

Everybody loves an up-and-comer: 2019's top three-year performers in revenues, profits, and stock returns.

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2018 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

Welcome to the inaugural Fortune Future 50, our new ranking of companies best positioned for breakout growth.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

Everybody loves an up-and-comer: 2018's top three-year performers in revenues, profits, and stock returns.

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2017 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

Everybody loves an up-and-comer: 2017's top three-year performers in revenues, profits, and stock returns.

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2016 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

Too fast to be stopped: 2016's top three-year performers in revenue, profits, and stock returns.

Business insiders have spoken: Asked which companies they most admire, more than 4,100 executives, directors, and analysts chose these top 50 All-Stars.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Nike, Cisco, MasterCard, SABMiller, Vodafone, Google—and 45 other companies that are doing well by doing good.

Change the World

This year's Fastest-Growing Companies marks the 19th running of the list. In our annual list of public companies with the most stellar three-year profit, revenue, and stock growth, Facebook makes its first appearance.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

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Founded in 2004 as Facebook, Meta operates the world’s largest social media platforms and has heavily influenced the development of the internet over the past two decades through its pioneering use of personal data collection and targeted advertising. Meta’s products include Facebook, image-sharing app Instagram, and messaging platforms Messenger and WhatsApp; together, they enable users to keep in touch, share images and videos, and buy and sell goods. Meta’s Reality Labs segment develops virtual-reality-related consumer hardware and software, while Meta AI develops artificial intelligence tools including language-processing models. Facebook renamed itself Meta in 2021.

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Meta Platforms (META): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Meta Platforms

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Good afternoon. My name is Krista and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Meta's third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, again, press star one. We ask that you limit yourself to one question, and this call will be recorded. Thank you very much. Rob Bevegni, Meta's Director of Investor Relations, you may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Meta Platforms third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, and Susan Li, CFO. Our remarks today will include forward-looking statements which are based on assumptions as of today. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various factors, including those set forth in today's earnings press release and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. During this call, we will present both GAAP and certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The earnings press release and an accompanying investor presentation are available on our website at investor.atmeta.com. I would like to turn the call over to Mark.

All right. Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining today. This has been a busy and exciting few months. Our family of apps is now used by 3.64 billion people each day, and we are seeing all-time highs in engagement on both Facebook and Instagram, driven by strong growth in video. Threads has now overtaken X in monthly actives and continues to grow quickly. WhatsApp is hitting all-time highs in messaging and is becoming an increasingly important platform for agents as well. In the last few months, we have had several major milestones towards our goal of delivering personal superintelligence to everyone. We had one of our most successful launches ever with the Muse personal agent. We shipped Muse Wonder as our first frontier model, and we shipped several new glasses and gadgets with Muse integration, including coming soon to our new audio glasses.

We have been discussing our vision for personal superintelligence for more than a year now. We want to help every person have an extremely capable personal agent that understands their goals and can help you achieve them and improve your life in whatever ways you want, whether that is improving your relationships, helping you save time, save money, build a business, create new things, or anything else that you can dream of. Muse is the product form of this vision. Now, we have the foundational technology in place to deliver this. There is still a lot of work ahead, but our initial position is very strong. In just a month and a half, more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada have set up Muse personal agents. Growth continues to be strong, and we have been number one in the App Store almost every day.

Engagement and retention are also off to a strong start. About 25% of people who have set up Muse use it on any given day. For our earliest adopters, the longer that they use Muse, the better the retention seems to get. To put this in perspective, this is more than twice the level that Threads started at, or where we believe that other AI apps started at as well. The most common use case for Muse is shopping, with more than a quarter of people who are using Muse engaging in this with an average purchase size of over $200. Plaid told us that they hadn't seen activity like they're seeing with their connector on any other service before. In the first week, we had to work with Stripe to raise credit limits since the volumes were above what any of us expected.

Beyond shopping, the most common connectors are for personal productivity and connecting Muse to your other services like email and calendar. This shows the importance of the Muse secure VM that we've built to provide state-of-the-art privacy and security, and we are looking forward to following up soon with a Muse confidential VM, which will make it so that even Meta cannot see your content. We've also seen that Muse Wonder improves quality, engagement, and retention further, which suggests that as we continue to improve intelligence, Muse will perform better and better over time. Now that Muse has clear product market fit, we are entering a new phase and a more operational phase that is focused on scaling it. The goals for this next phase play to many of Meta's strengths. We need to do three things: scale the product, grow revenue, and optimize compute costs.

We expect to grow Muse to serve billions of people. This is both our mission and our strategy. It's our mission in that we believe in putting the power of personal superintelligence in everyone's hands. We believe that that is the path to ensuring a positive future for everyone with individual empowerment as the source of prosperity and balance of power as the foundation for safety. On a values level, we believe that delivering this capability widely is the best thing that we can be doing. This is also our strategy because we think that billions of Muses in a network at scale will be able to get more done for people and businesses by working together. We'd like to create a large-scale Muse network as quickly as possible.

From a business perspective, the average revenue per American user for our existing Muse users, sorry, for our existing family of apps users, is several hundreds of dollars annually, and we expect that Muse will reach an even higher level over time due to the amount of commerce that we already see taking place. This will take some time, but we're starting to work on this now. Our business model will have a few components. For most people, the product should be free, and we will build commerce tools so we get paid a fee based on the transactions that we help facilitate. We expect this will be paid for by businesses. For people who want the most advanced models or to use extra tokens, they subscribe directly and pay.

For business owners who want additional features to use Muse to grow their businesses or for companies that want people to use Muse for work, they will be able to subscribe directly and pay as well. For those who want Muse to help improve the personalization and quality of their content and ads across Meta, they will be able to connect to those experiences as well. Just to clarify, the average revenue that I was talking about before is the family of apps revenue for our existing Muse users. On the compute side, we are building out the capacity to serve more than 1 billion people over the next few years.

In the near term, Muse is very compute-intensive to run, but we expect to improve its cost efficiency by more than 10x in the next year, which will enable it to be profitable once the revenue lines are at scale. If compute efficiency continues improving quickly for another few years, which we think is highly likely, then Muse will be highly profitable over multiple years. In the near term, the strength of our core business enables us to scale the Muse network before then, and we believe that we are the best-positioned company to pursue this strategy. One other note on compute economics is that since training is a large fixed cost, now that we have leading models, we want to serve as much high-margin inference demand as possible. That is why we are building the Meta Enterprise platform led by CJ Desai.

Muse Wonder and even more advanced models that we're training can serve additional high-margin services beyond the Muse network, including our API, Muse Code, and other enterprise services. A fundamental feature of our business is that we have many good uses for this compute. It is difficult to forecast the exact growth rates for the Muse network, for our Enterprise platform, and for how Muse Wonder and beyond will accelerate our core business. But through building up multiple ways to deploy these advanced models, we increase the chances that one or more of them significantly outperforms our expectations. Beyond serving other businesses, we have not yet found the limit of how effectively we can apply compute to accelerating our own core business. We have implemented an eval with Muse Wonder to improve how effectively it can autonomously improve our recommendations and ad systems.

As our upcoming models get even more advanced, I expect that we're going to see an increasing rate of improvement in these systems. All right. Let's talk about the models now. Muse Wonder is state-of-the-art across many dimensions that matter for personal superintelligence. This validates the importance of training models ourselves to deliver the best experience. In addition to Muse, we have also seen that engagement per person in Meta AI has more than doubled since April when we started rolling out our new models. While Muse Wonder has been our most important release, I've been very pleased with our pace of execution here. In the last few months, we've shipped Muse Spark 1.2 and 1.3, Muse Code, two open weights models with Muse Glimmer and Muse Spark Open, and also Muse Voice.

Going forward, with the field advancing quickly, we plan to focus on both pushing the frontier of intelligence and distilling those models into much smaller and more efficient product models that will be optimized for personal agents. My view is that we will be able to build superintelligence through scaling, so we are methodically working our way up the ladder there. We are already working on larger models after Muse Wonder, and they are going to be very impressive and capable. We are also working on new smaller models that are coming out soon that will deliver Muse Wonder-level intelligence more efficiently. Moving on, our work on personal superintelligence is now also the focus of Reality Labs. Muse is coming to Meta Glasses starting next month, and that will be an important step towards this.

People already love many features of the glasses already, music, calling, capturing moments, hearing assistance, and more. But over time, we expect Muse and having your personal superintelligence with you throughout the day will be the most important part of the experience. Muse is also central to the business model for the glasses. Again, our mission and strategy are to serve everyone here. We believe in putting the power of this technology in everyone's hands. So we have priced our devices not to make a large profit on the hardware, but to build a large software and superintelligence business on top of them over time. Glasses sales continue to grow rapidly, and now with Muse, we expect that paid subscriptions will increase and that this business will begin improving meaningfully from here.

I also shared at Connect that we are changing our approach to virtual reality to only ship new devices when we have major breakthroughs like we had with the Meta VR Glasses this year, which of course are the first VR experience ever in a pair of glasses. I continue to believe that the path to delivering holographic experience of bringing together the physical and digital worlds in everyday glasses will come through VR first, but we will pace this aspect of our investment more to focus on delivering personal superintelligence first. So with these factors combined, we expect that the P&L of Reality Labs to improve from here with operating loss coming down to around $15 billion next year and trending towards profitability from there. Before we conclude, I want to spend a moment on the sheer velocity that we are seeing.

An important part of our approach has always been to move fast so we can learn quickly and serve people better at scale. Recently things have accelerated. In the last year, we shipped Edits, and it has already passed 50 million actives. New apps like Forum and Seller were built by small teams and are scaling quickly to serve power users. Muse went from an idea on a whiteboard to a successful product in just about eight months. We are about to ship Muse Charm, which will have gone from concept to a hardware device in people's pockets in less than a year. I am proud of what we are building. People have all kinds of different opinions about the future, but at Meta, we believe that the future is for everyone, and that putting power in people's hands is how we get there. I think that this matters.

There needs to be a company out there that represents these ideas. This isn't just about ideas, it's also about execution. I am grateful for everyone who is working so hard to deliver all of this to billions of people around the world. As always, thank you to everyone who is on this journey with us. Now here's Susan.

Thanks, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. Let's begin with our segment results. All comparisons are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Q3 total family of apps revenue was $64.2 billion, up 26%. Q3 family of apps ad revenue was $63.1 billion, up 26% on both a reported and constant currency basis. In Q3, the total number of ad impressions served across our services increased 10%. Impression growth was healthy across all regions, driven by growth in engagement and users, as well as ad load optimizations. The global average price per ad increased 14% year-over-year, driven by ad performance gains and improvements in macro conditions relative to Q3 of last year. This was partially offset by strong impression growth, particularly from lower monetizing surfaces and regions. Family of apps other revenue was $1.1 billion and grew 59%, driven primarily by WhatsApp paid messaging and subscriptions revenue.

Within our Reality Labs segment, Q3 revenue was $443 million, down 6% due to lower Quest headset sales, which were partially offset by continued strong growth in AI glasses revenue. Moving now to our consolidated results. Q3 total revenue was $64.6 billion, up 26% on both a reported and constant currency basis. Q3 total expenses were $51.6 billion, up 68% compared to last year, and included a $9.9 billion charge related to the August 2026 multi-state attorneys general agreement. Year-over-year growth was primarily driven by legal-related costs, infrastructure costs, and third-party AI token costs. The growth in infrastructure costs was driven by higher third-party cloud spend, depreciation, and data center operating costs. We ended Q3 with over 66,000 employees, down 12% from Q2 following the May 2026 headcount reduction. Third quarter GAAP operating income was $13 billion, representing a 37% decline year-over-year and a 20% operating margin.

Excluding the Q3 legal charges related to the aforementioned legal settlement, our third quarter operating income would have increased 11% year-over-year. Our tax rate for the quarter was 24%, above our outlook range, primarily driven by the non-deductible portion of legal expenses. Net income was $9.9 billion, or $3.83 per share. Capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, were $34.9 billion, driven by investments in servers, data centers, and network infrastructure. Free cash flow was negative $2.1 billion. We ended the quarter with $82.4 billion in cash and marketable securities and $83.7 billion in debt. Turning now to the business performance. There are two primary factors that drive our revenue performance: our ability to deliver engaging experiences for our community and our effectiveness at monetizing that engagement over time. On the first, we continue to see significant gains from our content recommendation initiatives.

On Instagram, global time spent per user reached an all-time high and grew double digits year-over-year in Q3, with strength across both Reels and Feed. On Facebook, Reels time spent reached all-time highs both globally and in the U.S., with both growing double digits year-over-year. Threads also continued to scale, with time spent per user growing over 20% year-over-year. Engagement gains across our services continue to be driven by improvements we are making to the relevance, personalization, and timeliness of the content we recommend. Investments into our recommendations engine across retrieval and ranking have continued to yield positive results on Instagram and Facebook.

For instance, on Instagram Reels, our relevance launches in Q3 increased Reels time spent by over 4%, driven in part by our upgraded model architecture that ranks sequences of Reels at a time instead of evaluating each Reel independently, as well as improvements we made to add richer watch time signals. On Facebook Feed and Reels, we completed the global launch of a new generative retrieval architecture, which, inspired by LLMs, labels pieces of content with semantic representations and generates potential recommendations, helping our systems surface relevant new posts before they have accumulated significant engagement. This new architecture is now rolled out to roughly one-quarter of unconnected feed views and half of Reels views, and increased Reels watch time by 1%. Our recommendations work is also helping us deliver fresher and more personalized content.

Nearly 45% of recommended Instagram Reels are now less than one day old, up more than 11 percentage points from Q2. On Facebook Reels, we doubled the amount of history our ranking model can consider, driving a 1% increase in Reels watch time in the U.S. LLMs are also helping us understand content more deeply. We continue to process public Instagram posts each day through LLM-based content understanding systems. These signals have improved the engagement with Instagram search results by 1% through the end of this quarter. This quarter, we also began moving our content understanding models onto our first-party Muse model family. In offline evaluations, these models are outperforming our prior production models and are reducing per-unit content processing costs by more than 80% across Instagram, Threads, Facebook, and ads.

Beyond improving quality, owning more of this stack gives us greater flexibility to develop models around the signals that matter the most for personalization. Turning to the second driver of our revenue performance, increasing monetization efficiency. We see significant opportunity to continue improving performance for the businesses who use our services. Within our ad systems, we are continuing to drive performance gains as we deploy more predictive models that understand users more deeply and deliver ad experiences better aligned with their unique preferences, while also making our infrastructure more efficient. Last quarter, we introduced Meta Generative Recommender, which uses LLMs to reason across ad content and user preferences to predict the best ad for each person. In Q3, we launched this approach to generative retrieval on Facebook Feed, driving a nearly 2% increase in conversions across targeted segments.

In addition, we expanded our GEM model for ads ranking to additional surfaces, driving a 1.7% increase in conversions for off-site conversion campaigns and a 9.6% increase in app ad conversions. We continue to scale our retrieval systems efficiently. In Q3, improvements to Andromeda, such as scaling model complexity and throughput, increased conversions by 1.4% on Facebook. We are also leveraging AI to make it easier for businesses to manage campaigns, develop creative, and act on performance opportunities. Meta AI Business Assistant is becoming a more proactive and capable partner for advertisers. We estimate that advertisers who adopted its recommendations drove almost 5% more conversions at the same cost per conversion and increased their advertising investment by 9% compared with similar non-adopters. We are rolling out additional capabilities, including creative insights, stronger business context, and more agentic actions.

These features will allow marketers to plan, create, and optimize campaigns as well as schedule tasks and alerts through a conversational experience with approvals and previews that keep them in control. I will share one example of how Meta AI Business Assistant is empowering our advertisers. Simply Organic Maple, a family-run maple syrup producer in Vermont, used Meta AI Business Assistant to improve its campaign messaging. After the business assistant recommended testing longer, more descriptive advertising copy, the business saw a 57% increase in purchases and a 36% reduction in cost per purchase. Its strongest revised ad delivered a 3x return on ad spend, a 52% improvement from the original. Adoption of our generative AI ad creative tools also continues to scale. In Q3, nearly 10 million advertisers used at least one of these tools.

Advertiser adoption of our video generation features grew 25% quarter-over-quarter, driven in part by ready-made videos that reduce generation time to just a few seconds from a single image upload. We are also expanding the opportunity at the intersection of creators and advertising. Partnership ads, which allow advertisers to run ads with creators, brands, and other businesses, continued to scale rapidly in Q3. Our partnership ads product grew over 97% year-over-year and surpassed $15 billion in annual revenue run rate. In Q3, we also completed the global rollout of Creator Marketing Hub to all advertisers, bringing creator discovery, content organization, and partnership ad activation into one place with more than 10 million creators now discoverable. We are integrating Meta AI Business Assistant into the hub so advertisers can conversationally search for creators, identify content to use in partnership ads, and get guidance across their creator marketing workflows.

Outside of ads, we are also building out additional ways to monetize engagement across our ecosystem. In September, we announced the global expansion of Meta One, our unified subscription service for consumers, creators, and businesses. Meta One is rolling out gradually with more than 50 features across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, including Meta Business Agent and Meta AI, and has surpassed 15 million subscriptions and trials to date. The core experience across our apps and Meta AI will remain free, while subscriptions offer more specialized capabilities and expanded AI usage. Beyond monetizing engagement across our existing services, we are building new experiences and revenue streams around consumer agents. Mark highlighted the impressive early momentum with Muse. Users have found many reasons to use Muse, with the top three categories being shopping, personal productivity, and creativity.

We're encouraged by the breadth of use cases, with shopping in particular being used by over 25% of Muse weekly actives. While our near-term priority is to grow adoption and expand Muse's reach, we see multiple paths to monetization, beginning with subscriptions. We also see a significant opportunity to extend Muse to small businesses. Based on a recent user survey, we estimate that at least 500 million self-identified small businesses use Meta's family of apps to reach customers and generate revenue. Muse could help these businesses acquire customers and operate more efficiently while helping people complete transactions. Over time, consumer and business agents could connect and transact directly, creating opportunities around paid usage, commerce, and business services. Alongside growth, we are focused on building sustainable unit economics. Muse's compute intensity means that expanding its user base will require significant investment, and we expect total serving costs to rise.

At the same time, we expect to improve compute cost efficiency by more than tenfold over the next year, driven by better utilization of off-peak capacity, more efficient models, and inference optimization. As revenue scales, these efficiency gains give us confidence in our ability to build a highly profitable business over time. Moving now to our financial outlook. We expect fourth quarter 2026 total revenue to be in the range of $73 billion-$76 billion. Our guidance assumes foreign currency is an approximately 1% headwind to year-over-year total revenue growth based on current exchange rates. Turning to the expense and CapEx outlooks. We are raising our expense outlook to incorporate the $9.9 billion charge related to legal proceedings recognized in Q3. We now expect full year 2026 total expenses to be in the range of $175 billion-$179 billion.

Excluding the Q3 legal charge, we continue to expect 2026 operating income to be above 2025 operating income. At a segment level, we now expect Reality Labs losses to decline compared to 2025 to a range of $18 billion-$19 billion. We anticipate 2026 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $135 billion-$145 billion, narrowed from our prior outlook of $130 billion-$145 billion. Absent any changes to our tax landscape, we expect our fourth quarter 2026 tax rate to be between 15% and 17%. Additionally, we continue to monitor active legal and regulatory matters that could significantly impact our business and financial results. For example, we continue to see scrutiny on youth-related issues in several markets and have a number of youth-related trials scheduled in the coming months in the U.S.

Looking beyond 2026, we are still developing our budget and capacity plans for next year, but we expect to continue investing aggressively to support both our core business and emerging AI initiatives. Our current capacity and what is scheduled to come online gives us the flexibility to allocate resources across model training, core business growth, and the development and support of new products. Our AI investments are already delivering substantial incremental advertising revenue through stronger engagement, better recommendations, and more efficient monetization. Building on this progress, our MSL investments are creating the technology and infrastructure needed to unlock significant new revenue opportunities and strengthen capabilities across the business. While these investments will take longer to generate returns than those in our core business, the breadth of monetization opportunities and internal efficiencies gives us confidence in their long-term potential.

Looking ahead, although we are not providing a full year 2027 revenue outlook, the benefits our AI investments are delivering to the core business, combined with emerging opportunities from model advances and product launches, position us to sustain strong overall revenue growth throughout 2027. Separately, we remain focused on improving Reality Labs profitability. As Mark mentioned, we expect losses to narrow next year to around $15 billion as we reallocate investment towards other priority areas, primarily AI. Finally, today we announced plans to create a new class of non-voting capital stock, which will be distributed to all existing shareholders through a stock dividend.

For each existing share held, stockholders will receive one share of the new non-voting stock, effectively resulting in a two-for-one stock split. We expect trading to begin in late January 2027. In closing, our business momentum continued in Q3 with strong execution across our core ads and engagement initiatives, and we are also excited by our progress towards bringing personal superintelligence to everyone. With that, Krista, let us open up the call for questions.

Thank you. We will now open the lines for a question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star one on your touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, you may press star one again. Please limit yourself to one question. Please pick up your handset before asking your question to ensure clarity. If you are streaming today's call, please mute your computer speakers. Your first question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my questions. I have two, one on Muse, one on Enterprise. Maybe at first, congrats on the success of Muse. As you analyze the user behavior and the product, can you talk with us a little bit about any of the constraints to the slope of forward user growth that you're most focused on addressing, whether it's capabilities, model efficiency, capacity, et cetera, just so we understand what are the limiting factors to forward user growth that you want to address? The second one is on enterprise. Mark, can you sort of walk us through your vision for the Meta Enterprise platform offering and the key value drivers you hope to provide for the enterprises adopting the service?

Yeah, I think I can talk about both of those, and then Susan can jump in with anything else. Right now for Muse, one of the things I pointed out is we have more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada who have set it up, but I think one of the biggest constraints so far is that because this is a compute-intensive service to run, we have not launched it globally yet. That's partially because of wanting to optimize it for each place, and there's some workaround connectors for that. But it's partially that we want to make sure that we do this efficiently. I mean, there's pros and cons there.

The pro, of course, is that just makes it even more impressive that you have 10 million people using it and signing up to use it in the first six weeks, because those are all Americans and Canadians in a small number of markets. If we actually did roll it out more broadly, then you would expect that number to be significantly larger than what we're seeing today. On the flip side, we actually have to go do the work to bring the efficiency in line to make that make sense. That's a big part of it that we need to do.

The compute efficiency work is going to be important on this also because we want to make sure that we've built enough compute to be able to serve what we think is going to be a billion plus people if we can achieve certain compute efficiency targets. But we obviously have a lot of work to do there as well, and that'll be one of the limiting factors over the next year. We want to build out the business around it. I mean, I talked about that, and I think doing that in tandem with bringing down the compute or increasing the compute efficiency is going to be important for getting this to work from a business perspective, which I'm optimistic about. But I think that that's one of the things that we need to do.

There's just continuing to increase the value in the product, which I think we will largely do by continuing to develop new models. That's why I mentioned that we launched Muse first on Muse Spark, and that's what is currently the default across the free tier. We rolled out Muse Wonder, and people can access that in the paid tier today. We know that it performs a lot better, so we're working on getting a more efficient version of Muse Wonder that we'll be able to roll out more broadly.

You can imagine just as we iterate forward and two, three models into the future, when you have significantly higher intelligence and capability to solve many more problems for people and the ability to deliver that at a much more affordable price point, I think that that's going to just unlock a lot more value to people. So we're very excited about that. Transitioning to talking about the enterprise piece, because I think that these two pieces, there is some connection here, in that the main enterprise offering in the near term is going to be the model API in Muse Code. We have business agents that we've been scaling for a while, and each of those three things is growing quite quickly, so we're excited about that.

Over time, we would like to make it so that we have a whole business network of Muse agents as well. There's the business agent, which we've talked about on previous earnings calls for businesses to help out with sales and customer support. What we see is a lot of people are actually using Muse today to help run especially small businesses. We think that there's both an opportunity to help create an agent that people use to really enable them to automate and do a lot of the parts of spinning up a small business that are just difficult and time-consuming but aren't the core thing that a person is trying to do. So we think that's a big deal. Making a version of Muse that people can bring into different corporate environments and work there, we think is going to be a big deal.

Beyond that, building what I refer to as the Muse network, which is making it so that Muse is not just a single-player game where you have your Muse, but making it so that your Muses can work with your friends and your families. If you want to buy something, it's not just navigating to that business's website, it's talking to their agent. I think that getting that all to work well together is going to unlock tremendous value at scale. So I'm very excited about all of that. I think the enterprise use is going to be a big part of it, but it's also going to have this very valuable boost in the utility for consumers, too. So I'm very excited about both of those.

I would add to Mark's comments on enterprise. AI is creating huge amounts of disruption in enterprise today. From what we can see, we really don't believe that traditional enterprise companies have this locked down. In fact, some of the leading companies in this space today didn't exist a few years ago. Those companies made large investments in model development, and we've done the same, and we have increasingly competitive models to bring to bear for the benefit of all of our users, including small businesses and including enterprises. Already today, we have 500 million businesses using our product. We really believe that AI is going to reshape how businesses operate. We expect that businesses of all sizes are going to use AI agents across software development and productivity, sales, marketing, customer service, et cetera.

We have differentiated assets to serve this market, bringing together models, infrastructure, global distribution, and long-standing relationships with businesses. It's our hope that this will be able to be a new diversified, recurring revenue stream for us that will be able to support multiple business models, including subscriptions and usage-based API and messaging and other revenue lines. We expect that this will be an opportunity that will develop over multiple years, and we intend to scale our investment behind demonstrated customer demand and product market fit in this area.

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Thanks so much for taking the questions. Maybe just the first one building on Brian's question, when you think about the friction points around agentic commerce, how do you guys as a company think about solving for friction that's rising where there are aggregators or suppliers that don't want agents to interact with their platforms or their services, and how you think about lowering that friction or creating the right balance between the existing services that consumers access today relative to how this might all be changed or altered by agentic behavior over the medium to long term?

And the second one would be with the announcement of the new class of shares tonight with earnings, any updated thoughts broadly about how you think about sources of capital and optimizing your capital structure to make sure you invest the proper amounts to capitalize on the opportunities that AI are presenting in the next couple of years? Thanks so much.

I can answer the first one. Sorry, what was the first question there?

Yeah. Got it. All right. Yeah. So right now what we're seeing is that overwhelmingly businesses are very excited about enabling this because they recognize that it's going to be a new opportunity for them not only to increase the sales and the quality of the experience for existing customers, but also potentially to bring in new customers. So I mean, across the whole business ecosystem, different people will kind of adopt this at different paces. And how our strategy evolves on that to develop the ecosystem will depend on how that goes. But overall, I would say we've been very positively surprised by how quickly, I think a huge amount of businesses have wanted to not only figure out how to make it so that Muse can use their services more effectively but have reached out to us to integrate around it.

I view that as a very good sign. Not everyone wants to be an early adopter. That is fine. We will work with folks on the terms that makes sense for them. I do think that over time this is going to be quite valuable for everyone to make this work well, and I think we are on a good trajectory on that so far.

I would add to that, and I will also answer your second question and just say I think agents are going to be an important part of how reality evolves, and I think everyone is going to have to adapt to what that means, the new age of agentic commerce. We obviously have had a lot of businesses who are very excited to partner with us. There are also businesses that are understandably focused on protecting customer relationships, and we expect the market I think ultimately to evolve away from agents attempting to navigate every digital experience like a human. I think over the long run, this will move towards more permissioned, structured interactions, and that will include authenticated APIs, approved agent partnerships, or direct communications between a consumer's personal agent and a business's own agent. We are helping establish the standards needed to support that model.

Earlier this month, we previewed the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard across Muse and Meta Business Agents that we are developing with industry partners like Sierra, Walmart, Stripe, Shopify, et cetera. The protocol is intended to define how a consumer's personal agent can interact securely and reliably with the business's agent and preserve appropriate controls for both the business and customer. Again, I think adoption will likely be uneven and will take time, and in the near term we expect many experiences will remain AI-assisted rather than fully autonomous. As trusted integrations develop and agents demonstrate that they can generate incremental value and demand and operate safely, we expect that more and more businesses will be excited to participate. Your second question was about the announcement of the new class of shares.

I should say we created this new class of shares with the purpose of creating a publicly traded non-voting stock usable for capital raising, employee compensation, acquisitions, other general corporate purposes while preserving the voting power of existing Class A and B shareholders. We believe the share class will maintain our founder-led structure. It will expand our funding tools and give us flexibility to invest behind the unprecedented momentum we are seeing across every part of our business driven by AI. We do not have any specific financing plans to announce at this time, but we thought it was prudent to establish the appropriate capital structure framework to ensure that we have access to a diverse pool of funding sources.

Your next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. I have two. First, just wanted to follow up on your last comment, Susan. Just around as Muse evolves and more businesses adopt agents, just wanted to get your sense of how things change and shift as you go to more permission-based and agent-to-agent transactions, and what does that really unlock over time. Then secondly, just on expenses and CapEx, thinking about 2027, I know you're not really there yet, but if I go back to some previous comments, you've talked about maximizing compute in 2026 and 2027 and then having more flexibility in 2028. A year ago, you talked about notably larger dollar increase in 2026 than 2025, and then you've also used growing operating income on an annual basis as well. Just curious if there's any of those that you can tie or to help us think about 2027. Thanks.

Thanks, Doug. So on your first question about how the agentic ecosystem evolves, I wish I could sort of predict that more perfectly. I think it will take some time, and again, I think it will be a little uneven. But I definitely think that, when I use Muse today, it's clear that there are a lot of parts of the experience that would be even better if Muse was able to interact more seamlessly with business agents on the other side. For example, if Muse has to call a business on my behalf, I think it would be easier for the business if that call was handled by business agents that were representing it.

I think also one of the things that is really distinctive about Muse, and one of the things that makes the product experience so great, is the degree of proactivity that it exhibits on my behalf, right? I can give it a task and Muse is going to go execute against that task for me, even as it encounters some obstacles or can't quite find the right thing and needs to chart a new path to helping me look for the thing I want.

I think that sort of dimension of proactivity exhibited by either consumer agents or business agents, I think, are going to enable more transactions to happen or more activity to happen broadly than happens today where when more actions are taken, primarily when the latent demand expresses itself versus things where I can have Muse searching for things for me on an ongoing basis, giving me regular updates on things I'm looking for, sending me 10 new books a month. Agents should be doing similar things for businesses, and I think that creates sort of opportunities again for a new, more proactive sort of framework for what agent-to-agent interactions look like over time. On your second question, which is about 2027, we are quite early in developing our budget and capacity plans for next year.

Meta Platforms (META) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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