However, due to its nature as a company that prints money, it’s also a company that spends money like it’s water, and it’s doing that currently with artificial intelligence (AI) projects and metaverse experimentation that have so far not proven to be especially viable financially. So, all that enthusiasm should be tempered with a great deal of skepticism and care, realizing that most companies can’t convince the public to run their stock prices up as much as Wall Street expects. The analysis from CoinCodex, a technical trading website, puts the stock’s price for 2026 much lower — around $473 as an average annualized stock price.

The truth is probably somewhere in between. There’s no doubt that Meta is unusually successful, but that doesn’t mean it has a limitless value or that it won’t hit a growth plateau as it matures. At 20 years of age, a plateau could be just around the corner.

2030 forecast

The longer-term fortune of Meta is a different story. It’s not if Meta will be successful, but how successful this company will become. Even CoinCodex is convinced of its long-term ability to increase share prices, predicting an average annualized price of $944.12 for 2030.

This is a company on the move, and one that has generally been a huge winner for shareholders with long-term mindsets.

Meta’s highlights and risks

There have been a lot of things coming out of Meta’s research and development (R&D) that could affect its stock price, especially if those things continue to be black pits that money goes into and never comes back from. Here are some highlights and risks to consider.

• The metaverse. Meta continues to pour money into its metaverse project, despite most other companies pretty much abandoning the metaverse years ago. The bulky headsets and proprietary worlds are just not being adopted by users, and Meta is wasting a lot of money on these projects that are going nowhere.
• Meta AI (aka Llama). Meta’s AI project, “Llama,” on the other hand, is a uniquely positioned project that could be used to turn the buckets of money that Meta makes daily into absolute rivers of money. Although agentic AI is a long-term dream, this tool has access to every social media post that has ever happened on Facebook, as well as its deep well of user data, which could allow it to become an incredibly powerful advertising tool for the company and its users.
• Population density. Despite the kids these days claiming that only grandmothers are still on Facebook, the entire universe of Meta social media platforms caters to most age groups, allowing it access to everyone for advertising everything. This is not lost on businesses that continue to pour money into these platforms, and thus into Meta’s Scrooge McDuck-sized swimming pool of cash.

Despite the mostly good coming out of Meta these days, it’s important to understand that the core business is advertising, and the main way it’s being evaluated is as a tech business. This combination is not exactly investor-friendly, since the tech side can make it very volatile when things go against expectations, and the advertising business can be cyclical as the economy ebbs and flows. Even so, the company has created a competitive moat for itself that’s pretty impenetrable, and could lead to massive stock prices for even long-term investors who buy now.