Meta Invented A New Share Class To Pay For Its AI Build

Brian CurcioPublished October 22, 2026

Meta reported $64.6 billion of revenue for the third quarter and announced something stranger than the number: a brand new class of stock that carries no vote at all. The rest of the morning belonged to energy, with Brent crude higher after another deadly attack in Saudi Arabia and share prices lower across Europe and ahead of the U.S. open. France's ten-year borrowing cost passed 5% again, a line it had not crossed since 2002.

Fast Facts

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in penalties after a jury found it had misled users about data privacy, and the company said it will appeal (Read More)
Tesla's third-quarter revenue was flat at about $28.04 billion while net income fell 43% to $787 million, weighed down by spending on Optimus robots and AI and by lower sales of regulatory credits (Read More)
Delayed deals finally closed at IBM, lifting third-quarter profit and revenue across both its software and infrastructure units (Read More)
Record revenue of $8.22 billion was not enough for Lam Research, whose shares fell on supply constraints, a shrinking China share of sales and a cautious outlook (Read More)
Carrier will spend $600 million on a Texas plant building cooling equipment for AI data centers, the largest investment in the company's history (Read More)
U.S. crude inventories fell by 3.060 million barrels in the latest weekly report, a larger draw than forecasters expected (Read More)

Global News

Barclays said it will cut 5,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, as it leans on artificial intelligence to handle back-office work (Read More)
Hong Kong's Hang Seng index fell 3% to 22,934.68, its steepest drop since March 23, as hopes faded for stronger stimulus from Beijing, the South China Morning Post reported (Read More)
The Bank of Korea left its benchmark interest rate at 3% after two consecutive increases, pausing as inflation eased but stayed above target (Read More)
London Stock Exchange Group agreed to buy Octus, a credit intelligence and data provider, from the private-equity firm Permira for $3.5 billion (Read More)

Meta's Record Quarter Came With A New Class Of Shares That Cannot Vote

Meta reported revenue of $64.6 billion for its third quarter, up 26% from the same three months a year earlier, which puts last year's figure at roughly $51.3 billion. That is one quarter's sales, not a year's. Alongside the results, the company said it will create a new class of non-voting capital stock and hand it to existing shareholders as a stock dividend, meaning owners receive extra shares rather than cash. The Wall Street Journal and Forbes describe the arrangement as including a stock split; TechCrunch's account of the announcement does not use that word.

Meta's stock rose after the report. Investors appeared to be weighing not only the quarter just closed but the newer businesses behind it, including a personal assistant called Muse. A share price is a forecast: it is what people will pay today for a company's future profits, so a quarter already in the books moves a price mainly when it changes the view of the next several years.

A share of stock is two things at once: a claim on a slice of the company's future profits, and a vote on how the company is run. A company that issues new shares to raise money normally hands out some of both, which makes every existing owner's slice and say a little smaller. A non-voting class pulls the two apart. It lets Meta sell claims on future profits to help pay for its AI buildout while the votes stay exactly where they were, and the Journal's framing is that the new stock does not affect Mark Zuckerberg's voting control. Chief financial officer Susan Li listed raising capital, paying employees and buying other companies among the uses for the new class.

The caution sits in the cost line. Costs and expenses rose 68% from a year earlier against revenue up 26%, so spending grew about two and a half times as fast as sales. Meta also told investors to expect a loss of between $18 billion and $19 billion at Reality Labs, its headset and virtual-world division, according to TechCrunch's report of the company's own guidance. And a share class created to help fund a buildout is a promise about profits that have not arrived yet. Later quarters settle that.

Sources: WSJ · TechCrunch · Forbes · MarketWatch

Oil Went Above $111 After Another Attack In Saudi Arabia, And A Central Bank Half A World Away Raised Rates

Brent crude, the grade of oil that sets the price of much of the world's supply, traded above $111 a barrel early Thursday, up more than 2%, after the Wall Street Journal reported another deadly attack in Saudi Arabia. Stocks went the other way. U.S. stock futures, the contracts that trade before the opening bell, were lower, with technology leading the losses. European indexes fell in opening trade as crude climbed, and Asian shares finished at a three-month low on worries about the cost of building AI and tension in the Gulf. Crude was already near a five-month high after Saudi Arabia postponed its investment conference, which we covered on Tuesday. Thursday pushed it higher.

Oil is not a commodity you either own or do not own; it is an input to almost everything else. The barrel becomes diesel, diesel moves freight, and freight sits inside the price of food, building materials and anything that arrives on a truck. That is why a price set by traders in London shows up weeks later in a grocery bill thousands of miles from any oil field. It is also why central bankers, whose job is to keep general prices stable, watch a crude chart that has moved this much in a morning.

Thursday gave the clearest example of that chain. The Philippine central bank raised its policy rate, the rate that sets what banks pay to borrow, by more than economists expected, warning that inflation would accelerate further as renewed Middle East tensions pushed up energy prices. The Philippines imports much of its energy, so a higher barrel lands there as a higher fuel price, and a policy rate feeds through to car loans, home loans and small-business credit within months. So a family in Manila may pay more on a loan this year because of something that happened in Saudi Arabia on a Thursday morning.

Sources: WSJ on oil and the attacks · WSJ on the Philippine rate rise · Nasdaq on Asian shares · our October 20 briefing

France's Ten-Year Borrowing Cost Crossed 5% For The First Time Since 2002

France's ten-year government bond yield topped 5% in early Paris trading on Thursday, a day after touching that level for the first time since 2002. The move follows unrest in France. That 5% is an intraday reading, not a closing level. A government's borrowing cost is simply the yield investors demand in return for lending to it, here for ten years, and it moves when their view of the risk changes. We covered the first leg of this on Monday, when France's weekend of protest showed up in what it costs the country to borrow; what is new is the 5% line and the distance to Germany. The Wall Street Journal reports that the gap between French and German ten-year yields is at its highest level since 2011, which means the market is charging France more than Germany for the same ten years of lending.

For scale, the U.S. ten-year Treasury yield closed at 5.13% on October 21, 2026, up 1.0 basis point, one hundredth of a percentage point. France is now borrowing for a decade at close to what the United States pays. Who holds the debt matters too. The Journal reports that foreign investors are looking to pull back from French debt, and when a large buyer steps away the yield has to climb far enough to bring a different lender in. Eyb & Wallwitz told the Journal that investors could again seek German government bonds as a safe haven if concerns over France intensify. The South China Morning Post reports that analysts expect the pressure to persist in the near term, while staying well short of another crisis.

Sources: France 24 · SCMP · WSJ on the gap to Germany · WSJ on foreign investors · our October 19 briefing

What To Watch

Every company figure below is analysts' average forecast for earnings per share, not a result.

Reporting today:

Procter & Gamble (PG), before the open: $1.89 expected against $1.99 a year ago, a useful read on whether shoppers are trading down.
Also before the open: Union Pacific (UNP) $3.47 against $3.08 a year ago, Lockheed Martin (LMT) $7.49 against $6.95, and Comcast (CMCSA) $0.98 against $1.12. Valero, Spotify, Blackstone, Barclays, Norfolk Southern and Honeywell are also expected before the bell.
After the close: Western Digital (WDC) $3.99 against $1.64 a year ago, and the gold miner Newmont (NEM) $1.94 against $1.71. In all, 138 companies are on today's calendar.

Later this week:

American Express (AXP) is expected before the open tomorrow at $4.47 against $4.14 a year ago, alongside the oilfield-services company SLB at $0.62 against $0.69, plus ENI and Infosys.

Next week:

The Federal Reserve's rate-setting committee meets on October 27 and 28, with a press conference expected at 2:30 p.m. ET on the 28th. Nothing has been decided.
Verizon reports Monday before the open, with Welltower, Cadence Design Systems and Nucor after the close.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes Gross Domestic Product and Personal Income and Outlays on Thursday, October 29.
The Bank of England meets with inflation still above target, and the question is whether it raises rates for the first time since the Iran war began.
Two prices worth following on their own: whether the French ten-year holds above 5%, and where crude settles after this week's attacks.

The Classroom Takeaway

Meta's new share class separates the two halves of a share: the claim on future profits, and the vote. Students can follow the first half of that bargain in a stock market simulator, then ask who is holding the second half.