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.
You must log in or # to comment.
First they’ll collapse slowly, then all at once. The debt is catching up to them, they’ll start laying off even more people, and they’ll try to increase revenue by running more ads, and charging more for the ads, etc.
If you think they, or any of them, including our own government, are “too big to fail”, well, it’s happened before.
I don’t understand why businesses don’t predict this downward spiral. I recall a city with crap bus infrastructure saying ridership was down so they had to increase fares. So then a while later, oh ridership is lower again, let’s increase fares. Duh, its down because the routes suck and you’ve increased the barrier to choosing to use it. SMH
I believe what you’ve described is intentional with any service that someone is looking to cut. Step one: this service sucks and doesn’t deserve as much funding as it has. Step two: cut funding. Step three: see step one.
Smaller businesses or privately owned businesses with a smart owner do.
Large publicly traded companies are sustained by a perception that an investment in or loan to that company will pay off in a higher dollar amount in the future, so if the perception becomes the company is shrinking then the investments and loans slow down which makes the perception worse, you get that feedback loop which turns into the death spiral.
So the bigwigs at the top of these companies have to be professional liars and gamblers to change the perception and make it look like everything isn’t just fine, they’re doing great! The line must go up.
I would love it if this were true, but as a member of the mag seven, they get a huge majority of the investible income of the world by default. Passive investing is 55% of the overall investing that happens now, and that means sending money to zuck more or less regardless of what he does or doesn’t do. It’s very hard to fuck that up. Not impossible, but they will be handed a lot of money for a long time. They will have to really fuck up badly to really die.
OpenAI has entered the chat
Is “dying” the right word? They’re struggling, but I won’t be surprised if this administration or the next bails Meta out, since fb and insta are essentially public services for a lot of people, as much as I hate that. The smart thing for the fed government to do is to nationalize Meta’s platforms.
They’re not public services. They’re hostile psy-ops around the world, helping destabilise other governments.
It’s high time other countries just outright blocked that cesspool, and Twitter while they’re at it.
“other governments”
Right, so “public services”, as the filthy rich would sarcastically put it. Facebook is one of the major set of chains that bind, and direct us, none of them want to lose that.
Problem is, it’s been overrun by rage bait for clicks and vocal extremists.
It’s weird watching people think their opinion is popular because a handful of people are shouting it everywhere on Facebook.
It’s no longer fun, and there is no way to force only posts by people you know. So all the racist garbage gets lots of engagement and is also added to your feed
3.58 to 3.56 billion isn’t really significant because in the long term these sort of mega corporations can easily recover that many users.
But I like they’re getting covered in debt, though idk how far it is from collapse as these numbers don’t make much sense to me.
Might be boomers dying off, and young people won’t use Facebook because it’s not cool to have an account there?
the pessimism in me suspects they’ll just get a cushy bailout from the government later. SOCIALIST CAPITALISM - when the government only cares about corporations and not people
That’s just capitalism. But yeah, they can just bailout since the concept of separate legal entities means that individual investors aren’t held responsible for corporate losses.
When you speak of billions and trillions it’s all meaningless bullshit and everything has gotten too far out of hand.
Yeah, it’s wild. I think these numbers are really literally making people into obsessive power hoarders like smaug. All this time and humanity has not yet learned it’s not a great idea for any one person to have amassed such wealth and power.
That’s about 3 billion people too many.
Company: grows 5% in a year instead of predicted 5.5%
Corporate media: It’s dead.
How
the FUCK
can a single datacentre cost
TWENTY SEVEN BILLION
dollars?
deleted by creator
Well, you have the actual, physical cost of the datacenter – the land, the design, the engineers, the permits, the environmental studies, the lawyers, the construction, etc – and then you have the cost of removing roadblocks along the way. Especially in Louisiana, if you’re not familiar with Huey Long: he’s been gone for many decades, but his way of doing business down there hasn’t changed a bit.
It’s exactly like the East Wing ballroom: there’s a private fund that Trump opened specifically for businessmen to contribute that will fund the ballroom construction, which has been open and taking donations since he tore the East Wing down, and there’s also the bill before Congress, right now, that will have the ballroom paid for by tax dollars, all of it.
“But,” you may ask, and rightly so, “why are private contributions needed to fund a ballroom that will be funded entirely by taxes?” and the answer to that is, “Yes.”
One of the sure signs you’re in a banana republic is that every palm must be greased on the way to getting legal consent for anything, no matter how small. The US is now no different.
Funny how you use the term “banana republic” to mean “corruption that wasn’t in the US” when the situation that coined the term was created by American imperialism in the first place.
Edit: not disagreeing with you btw, just found that specific use of words ironic, given the background.
No, you’re quite right. To be fair, from slavery to robber barons, I don’t think we have ever been free of corruption. But now we’re speedrunning into the level of corruption of having to bring extra cash for the bribes when renewing a drivers license.
RGB :3
Gimme the money I’m going on a world home building and feeding tour. I’m mansa musa 2.0
RAM prices bruh.
/s
They have been keeping track of every website you visit for at last two decades
This is a nytimes article about meta reaching lemmy all frontpage. It’s up to you whatever meta dies or not, stop upvoting their shit.
Not dying fast enough. A list of good reasons to quit social media: https://www.arscyni.cc/file/quit_facebook.html.
That would be nice. But it won’t happen. Even if Zuck bankrupts it, some Elon will buy it and nazify it and keep going. All those sheep on insta and facebook are waay to valuable to let go.
Exactly. It is just a brand in a larger homogeneous surveillance capitalist social media landscape. If they “fail,” the brand just gets absorbed into one of the others. If they “win,” they absorb brands (like instagram).
some Elon will buy it and nazify it and keep going
Those Knickerbocker(?) twins and that four-eyes wanting to get even at Zuck.
It might not completely go away, but it will slide further and ever quicker into irrelevance. Just like Xwitter has done.
Left Meta (incl whatsapp) more then a year ago. Haven’t missed it for a bit. Quite liberating actually, especially leaving whatsapp was great
Bullshit:
Meta reported for its most recent quarter (Q1 2026, ended March 31, 2026):
- Revenue: $56.3 billion
- Net income (profit): $26.8 billion
That was up from:
- $42.3 billion revenue a year earlier
- $16.6 billion net income a year earlier
When an aging business starts to take on water, the quickest, easiest — and most destructive — solution is to make moves that will generate more money now but may cost the company later. And that’s exactly what Meta has started to do. In the first three months of this year, the company started cramming more ads onto its platforms while charging advertisers more. Those choices may have allowed the company to increase its revenue per user by a significant 27 percent in the first quarter of 2026, but they are also likely to further alienate users (and annoy advertisers).
oh no they only have 3.5 billion users how will meta ever survive, their ability to take on debt must mean they are seen as unable to pay debts
I believe the company is at the start of a long, slow decline … if you look carefully, you can see chinks in the armor
Almost lyrical, free of palpable fact. Well, at least it’s labeled “Opinion”
The latest earnings, released on April 29, revealed a dip in user numbers for the first time since it started reporting these figures.
This seems to be what got the author spinning their vision. I’ll take it. Here’s to hoping 🥂
You can down vote such bullshit headlines too. It is clear that it is nonsense.
When you don’t understand how full accounting works.
Fraud and tax evasion, right?
