Meta reported record-setting sales and profits on Wednesday afternoon, with the parent company of Facebook and Instagram posting $20.84 billion in Q4 net income.
The company also reported revenue of $48.4 billion between October and December of 2024, surpassing analyst estimates of $47 billion. Meta’s Q4 report indicates the company is still a dominant force when it comes to online advertising, with 97% of the company’s sales stemming from ads.
Notably, Meta posted the strong Q4 report despite continuing to lose a lot of money on Reality Labs, its division focused on virtual reality and augmented reality technology. Reality Labs lost $4.97 billion during Q4 — up from the $4.42 billion loss Meta reported in Q3 2024.
“We continue to make good progress on AI, glasses, and the future of social media,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “I’m excited to see these efforts scale further in 2025.”
Here are the top-line results:
Revenues: $48.4 billion, up 21% year-over-year. Meta’s Q4 sales from Zack’s Investment Research estimated revenues of $47 billion. As usual, the bulk of Meta’s sales came from ad revenue, which accounted for $46.8 billion.
Net income: Earnings per share of $8.02 topped the $6.68 EPS that analysts had projected, per Zack’s Investment Research.
Daily active users: Daily users of one of Meta’s apps — which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads– climbed 5% annually to 3.5 billion.
Meta has been one of the hotter big name companies on Wall Street in the last few months, with the company’s share price climbing 17% since the start of October. Heading into its Q4 report on Wednesday afternoon, Meta was the seventh most valuable company in the world, with a market cap of $1.71 trillion.
The 2024 election coincided with Meta’s fourth quarter, and Zuckerberg made it clear he wanted platforms like Facebook and Instagram to be less political than in previous years. To that end, both platforms featured less political content in favor of posts on sports, cooking, and celebrity news.
But Zuckerberg himself has not avoided the political spotlight in recent months. He has looked to improve his relationship with President Donald Trump following the election, including visiting Mar-a-Lago and having Meta donate $1 million to his inauguration fund. Zuckerberg was prominently featured behind President Trump last week at his inauguration, sitting alongside other Big Tech executives like X owner Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Despite his cozier relationship with the president, many Trump supporters told TheWrap last week they are skeptical of Zuckerberg’s sudden embrace of the president.
It certainly stands out when compared to four years ago, when Zuckerberg “indefinitely” banned Trump from both Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg, at the time, said “the risks” of keeping the president on his platforms, following the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot, were “simply too great.”
More recently, Zuckerberg has said he wants Facebook and Instagram to censor less content. Zuckerberg announced earlier this month that Meta would end its third party fact-checking operation in favor of a system similar to X’s Community Notes. That decision was about “restoring free expression” to Facebook and Instagram, Zuckerberg said.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg added.
Later, during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg compared his company’s now-jettisoned fact checking team to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “1984.”
On the business side, Zuckerberg said Meta will be prioritizing its artificial intelligence development moving forward. He said last week Meta would spend $60 billion-$65 billion this year to fuel AI expansion. Meta’s Llama model faces a crowded AI landscape in which it competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, X’s Grok, and Google’s Gemini, among other models.
Meta will hold a call at 2:00 p.m. PT to discuss its Q4 report.
More to come…
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