Ackman & Meta: A Brief, Sad Story

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They say billionaires have to tell us what they’re buying. Form 13F, it’s called. A little peek behind the curtain, as if knowing where the money goes will somehow make sense of things. So it goes. Bill Ackman, a man who moves a lot of money around, recently decided to load up on Meta Platforms. Nearly two billion dollars worth. It’s a substantial gesture, even for a man accustomed to thinking in terms of multiple zeroes.

He bought 2.67 million shares. Zero before, now… well, now there are 2.67 million. It’s over 11% of his Pershing Square portfolio. A large chunk. People are always looking for clues, for signals. Maybe this is one. Maybe it’s just a man making a bet. It often comes down to that, doesn’t it?

The Market & Meta: A Love-Hate Thing

Meta, formerly Facebook, has moods. It was loved, then it wasn’t. It tried to sell us the metaverse, a digital world where we could all be slightly more miserable together. That didn’t quite catch on. So it goes. The market punished them for it, naturally. Cheap stock prices are a sort of public shaming. Now they’re trying to be serious about artificial intelligence, which requires enormous data centers. And that, too, is making the market nervous.

Twenty-seven times trailing earnings isn’t exactly a giveaway, but it’s better than some. And forward earnings are a bit cheaper, around 21.3 times. The S&P 500 is at 21.9. Not a huge difference, admittedly. But Meta is the cheapest of the “Magnificent Seven,” all those tech giants who seem to think they can solve everything. Ackman seems to think they might, at least in the long run.

Recent Results: Not Terrible, Really

The stock is down about 20% from its high. You’d think they were losing money hand over fist. But revenue rose 24% last quarter, to $59.9 billion. Operating margin was a healthy 41%. Earnings per share were up 11%. Not bad, not bad at all. It’s just that they’re planning to spend between $115 and $135 billion on data centers. A lot of money. The market doesn’t like that. It never does.

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An investment in Meta now is a bet that this spending will eventually pay off. Or that they’ll stop spending and just… make money again. They could do that, you know. They’re perfectly capable of it. It’s just that generative AI is so… alluring. A shiny distraction, perhaps. But Ackman is a long-term investor. He’s used to waiting. So it goes.

I suspect he sees a future where Meta, despite all the noise, continues to generate substantial cash flow. Or, at the very least, doesn’t completely collapse. A reasonable expectation, I suppose. In a world full of unreasonable things.

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2026-02-26 23:52