Meta’s decade-long stock runout still beats the market, even as investors weigh rising AI spending

Meta Platforms’ shares have cooled from their highs, but an updated look at the company’s long-term stock performance suggests the fundamental payoff of years of earnings growth has been substantial. In an analysis published June 7, 2026, The Motley Fool said a $10,000 investment made in early June 2016 in Meta stock would be worth $53,380 “today,” a gain of roughly 434% over the period, and an outperformance versus the S&P 500. The article frames the calculation alongside Meta’s recent volatility, noting the stock is down about 8% in 2026 as of June 6 and around 23% below the peak it reached last August.

At the time of publication, the same analysis put Meta at $593.06 per share, with a 52-week trading range of $520.26 to $796.25. The article also described Meta as trading below its record high, and it pointed to a modest dividend context, citing a dividend yield of about 0.35%. On valuation, it said Meta was trading at a price-to-earnings ratio of 22.8, suggesting investors were still paying for growth expectations rather than focusing solely on current cash flows.

The backtest also ties Meta’s stock behavior to operating scale. It highlighted Meta’s “mind-boggling” user base across its social platforms, citing 3.56 billion monthly active users, and argued that the scale underpins advertising technology, including recommendation algorithms and targeted ads. That matters for how quickly Meta converts engagement into revenue, which in turn can influence investor perceptions of earnings durability.

Beyond user scale, the article points to the main near-term risk factor for the stock story: the cost of building the infrastructure needed to support artificial intelligence workloads. It said Meta’s capital expenditures are projected to total $125 billion to $145 billion in 2026, describing that investment push as part of a broader effort to expand technical infrastructure “to power” the company’s AI ambitions. In that framing, heavy spending can pressure margins and raise questions about timing, even if it is intended to strengthen future product performance and ad monetization.

Meta’s own latest guidance aligns with that capital-spending band. In its first-quarter 2026 results release, the company said it expects 2026 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $125 billion to $145 billion, up from its prior range of $115 billion to $135 billion. Meta attributed the increase to higher component pricing and additional data center costs to support future year capacity, and it reiterated that its AI initiative is part of its forward plan, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg referencing the release of the first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs.

That same earnings release also offered a snapshot of operating momentum that provides context for why the market may have rewarded Meta’s long-run strategy. Meta reported family daily active people (DAP) of 3.56 billion on average for March 2026, and it reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $56.311 billion, up 33% year over year. It also disclosed first-quarter 2026 capital expenditures of $19.84 billion and said operating income and net income rose sharply year over year.

Even with these disclosures, key details that investors usually focus on were not fully answered in the backtest itself. The Motley Fool piece did not lay out, in the excerpted discussion, whether the $10,000 outcome assumed dividend reinvestment or how it handled small timing effects around the “early June 2016” purchase window. It also did not quantify how much of Meta’s 10-year performance came from buybacks versus operating growth. Separately, while the company’s capex range is clear, Meta did not in the earnings release provide a granular breakdown of which portions of the spend are allocated to specific AI model training pipelines versus inference and serving infrastructure.

For readers looking ahead, the practical watchpoints are straightforward: whether Meta can translate its large 2026 infrastructure build into measurable improvements in engagement quality, ad pricing power, and operating leverage, and whether investors gain confidence that the return timeline on AI capex will match the scale of the spending. The near-term stock path may remain choppy while the market gauges the spending pace against earnings and efficiency, especially given the company’s explicit willingness to spend heavily to build capacity.