Zuckerberg is riding high, too. Sipping a Guinness<\/a> alongside Wang during a recent podcast interview, the pair extolled Meta’s AI prowess.<\/p>\n “You never know when you launch something how it’s going to be received,” the CEO said. “There’s always the case where you get a home run, which in this case it was, right? And it’s just like extremely well received right off the bat.”<\/p>\n And Meta seems to believe in Zuckerberg’s leadership more than ever. His latest coup: Convincing the company to issue a new class of shares after he threatened to list his Palo Alto compound and leave California as voters weigh a billionaire tax<\/a>.<\/p>\n The big question is how long the good vibes will last. Meta is still spending gobs of money on AI without a concrete financial payoff. Some remain skeptical.<\/p>\n “The bill is huge,” David Wagner, a portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, told Business Insider.<\/p>\n “He’s won the narrative. He hasn’t proven the return yet.”<\/p>\n Meta’s social reckoning era<\/p>\n Zuckerberg is no stranger to public discourse. He’s undertaken multiple personas: the nerdy wunderkind in hoodies, the jacked wife guy<\/a>, the unapologetically masculine Trump ally<\/a>.<\/p>\n At the beginning of this year, it looked as if he was headed for a new reckoning, and it wasn’t just because of the aptly named sequel to “The Social Network.”<\/a><\/p>\n Zuckerberg was on trial,<\/a> taking the stand in a landmark lawsuit that alleged Meta’s platforms harmed the mental health of young people. (Meta was found negligent and is appealing.) It was one of three major lawsuits this year that put the company on the defensive against claims that its technology posed safety risks to children.<\/p>\n In February, Mark Zuckerberg appeared at a Los Angeles courthouse to defend the company in a landmark social media addiction trial.\u00a0<\/p>\n Jon Putman\/Anadolu via Getty Images<\/p>\n And there were the more typical Zuckerberg cringe moments, too, like his front-row appearance at a Prada fashion show<\/a> that raised eyebrows across the internet.<\/p>\n On the inside, employee morale<\/a> was waning. Though the billionaire CEO had called 2026 “the year of AI,” Meta had little momentum, and unpopular decisions \u2014 including a program to track employee keystrokes<\/a> \u2014 amplified the discontent.<\/p>\n Want more Business Insider in your news feed?<\/p>\n \n Add BI in Google so our reporting is easier to find when you\u2019re searching for what matters.\n <\/p>\n Also, Meta had one of its largest rounds of layoffs, ever. Meta began trimming staff in March, followed by a huge round in May, when it laid off about 10% of its workforce.<\/p>\n Separately, Meta reshuffled another 7,000 workers as part of an AI-focused reorganization<\/a> of its tech and product teams. Many engineers were relegated to individual contributor status. Meta later asked<\/a> some of the employees it had demoted to return to their managerial roles.<\/p>\n The AI push didn’t seem to be paying off: In the second quarter of this year, 98% of revenue came from its traditional advertising business \u2014 not AI.<\/p>\n Morale was “maybe not the worst it’s ever been in 20 years here, but it’s probably up there,” Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, said during an internal call in June.<\/p>\n The groundwork for Meta’s comeback<\/p>\n Amid the chaos, Zuckerberg laid the groundwork for a comeback. Wang and Meta’s elite AI researchers moved their desks<\/a> to sit near Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n Starting last year, Zuckerberg and Wang also went on a talent-hiring spree, dangling pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars to poach top researchers.<\/p>\n Zuckerberg empowered key lieutenants, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, to go ham on any vision they had, including on his pet project, an AI assistant. It all fit into Zuckerberg’s longtime playbook of embracing small teams and overseeing reorgs until something works \u2014 move fast and break things, as he has infamously put it.<\/p>\n It worked.<\/p>\n Muse, the long-awaited Meta AI agent, became a breakout hit. A week after it launched, it shot to the top of the app store, and has since achieved more than 10 million downloads in North America. The team was stunned to have beaten OpenAI to market, a person familiar with the matter said. OpenAI’s rival product, Dots, launched three weeks later.<\/p>\n Jolly is the mascot for Meta’s Muse AI agent, which launched successfully last month.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bloomberg\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Meta also threw unprecedented compute and talent at building a series of frontier AI models, called Muse Wonder<\/a>, that could keep up with those from giants like OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n On Meta’s third-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg was optimistic that Meta’s AI and hardware investments could soon become cash cows, as people shop through Muse and buy more virtual-reality glasses powered by the company’s growing AI chops.<\/p>\n Meta, meanwhile, views Zuckerberg as more critical than ever to its long-term fortunes.<\/p>\n Key board members abruptly excused themselves from a dinner with Zuckerberg in September after he told them he was going to sell his Palo Alto estate in response to California’s proposed billionaire tax, Meta disclosed in a filing on Wednesday.<\/p>\n Four days later, a special committee returned with a deal that would give Zuckerberg $20 billion<\/a> in “immediate liquidity” to cover the tax \u2014 if it passes \u2014 without reducing his controlling stake in Meta. Meta also made plans to ensure that billions in fresh AI fundraising wouldn’t dilute Zuckerberg’s control.<\/p>\n “Meta’s track record of significant value creation for its shareholders is in large part due to his strong leadership, unique and creative vision, and exceptional management abilities,” the company said in a press release.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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