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.
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FB is hitting the issue the “growth at any cost” business philosophy hits, they’ve run out of subscribers. Like any system or organism(s) they hit the resource wall, in this case people. There really aren’t more people to sign up, they’ve pretty much squeezed what they can from advertisers. Now they are left with hairbrained schemes to push out into unrelated areas at the cost of accumulating debt. Buying up other businesses has a very mixed track record.
Wall St hates stable, steady, companies. They want endless growth when it ultimately isn’t possible. Without expansion the only way to grow profits is to cut costs. Shareholders and boards demand more. You lay off people, you cut benefits, you make the service poorer quality, cram in more junk ads, more scammers and fraud due to a lack of human monitoring, no customer service for aggrieved users, profits go up for a moment from the cuts but people start to leave so you cut more. The MBAs take the reigns, disconnected from the founders and no loyalty to the business. Execs get their bonuses for each cut and layoff and flee the sinking ship. Hedge funds profit off of the falling stock as they short it. Ads become click bait, toe fungus and ear wax ads. Down it goes…
Oh it also owns WhatsApp, one of the best messaging platforms for scammers. FB’s reels feature is mostly AI generated scammy crap. I’ve noticed a dramatic upsurge in blatantly fraudulent accounts on FB recently. I report them all but I doubt anything is done. I have never received any feedback.
Too bad Zuckerberg will walk off stinking rich with his Hawaii bunker.
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.
Cant wait for businesses to have websites again.
First they’ll collapse slowly, then all at once.
People have been predicting in imminent collapse of various tech firms for what feels like decades
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
There is a certain type of people that absolutely hate public transit, because its the evilbad socialism.
So they do everything in their power to sabotage it and make it as awful as possible, with the ultimate goal of selling it off to one of their pals and privatize.
Businesses are only as smart as the dumb humans who run them
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.
Republican playbook.
“Starve the beast”
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.
Oh, hey, they are doing that in my city right now. It’s a classic!
Nothing is too big to fail. Some things are simply too big to fail gracefully or quietly.
Meta-nay-Facebook is one of those things.
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.
When you speak of billions and trillions it’s all meaningless bullshit and everything has gotten too far out of hand.
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.
Honestly, I think it’s massively significant. For a start off, that’s 20 million people, the population of Chile, in one quarter. That’s a lot of people regardless of how you slice it.
But more to the point, Meta services - Facebook especially - have reached a point of cultural impact where anyone who doesn’t have them can’t be talked into getting them anyway. Plus, they’re useful messaging services too, because everyone else uses them. Their popularity has become self-fulfilling. The idea of Meta losing more users than it’s gaining at all has been frankly unthinkable until recently.
It’s a lot of people but big tech can easily get back those numbers.
Let’s see how the tendency unrolls over the long-term.
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.
That’s about 3 billion people too many.
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
I’ve been spending a whole lot less time on Facebook recently, I’ve deleted the app off my phone, and just check in once a day or so on my computer.
They just don’t seem to grasp that I want to see what my friends and family are doing, not meme pages.
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
Yeah there’s a lot of wishful thinking in this article. They still have a shit ton of cash, a lot of smart people, an incredible ad engine they can deploy onto any internet property. The metaverse was a complete wank but they still have more to work with than just about anyone out there.
Even if this article is right, and their arc has finally turned downward, it’s because they’ve finally hit the peak of an absolutely epic run. Stink of death? I hate them as much as anyone, but yeah… no.
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
You can down vote such bullshit headlines too. It is clear that it is nonsense.
When you don’t understand how full accounting works.
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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).
It might not completely go away, but it will slide further and ever quicker into irrelevance. Just like Xwitter has done.
I’m still waiting for that company to actually die. From what I can tell, Yi Long Ma has spun it into one of his other companies and spun that company into SpaceX. And he’s milked the AI thing. I used to laugh wondering where he’d get the 40 billion to pay off Ellison and the rest of the funders who actually paid for Twitter. The sad truth is he can find 40 billion in his couch cushions, but won’t even have to because he’ll book-cook his way out of it.
Yeah, I can’t wait for the tell-all book that someone inevitably releases in 20 years about how Xwitter was a complete ghost town propped up by sports and racism. The company is clearly hemorrhaging money like a firehose.
some Elon will buy it and nazify it and keep going
Those Knickerbocker(?) twins and that four-eyes wanting to get even at Zuck.
There’s only about eight billion humans in existence. 3.56B daily active users is as close to saturated as you can get.
What a stupid cope.
Meta is simply too big to fail, they can do whatever they like. Name a single big tech company that died in the last 20 years. Hell, even Oracle who make basically nothing of real value is doing incredibly well.
Yahoo and MySpace come to mind. Probably could count Nokia and Blackberry, although they were more phone/hardware.
Possibly AOL, but their “death” may have been more than 20 years ago.
And while technically some of those companies “exist” in some capacity today, I don’t think we’d consider any of them except Yahoo as anything but a name/brand at this point.
Ask Jeeves
Left Meta (incl whatsapp) more then a year ago. Haven’t missed it for a bit. Quite liberating actually, especially leaving whatsapp was great
Yet none of this will reduce Fuckerberg’s cash pile. We need to take that back.
