Story perspectives

Meta Shares Drop 10% After Earnings Beat, User Miss, Layoffs

5/2/2026

Summary

Meta Shares Plunge

Meta's shares fell more than 10%, wiping roughly $170 billion from its market value.
First-quarter revenue reached $56.31 billion, a 33% year-over-year increase and the strongest since 2021.
Daily active users slipped to 3.56 billion, missing the 3.62 billion forecast and down 20 million from the prior quarter.
JPMorgan cut Meta to Neutral, lowered its price target to $725, and announced the company will lay off about 8,000 staff, roughly 10% of employees.

Summary

Meta Expands AI

Meta launched Muse Spark and hired over 50 AI researchers from rivals.
Business AI handles 10 million weekly conversations and serves over 8 million advertisers.
Multi-year infrastructure contracts rose $107 billion this quarter, securing compute through 2027.
Reese Witherspoon warned women are falling behind in AI, citing only three of ten book-club members use AI tools.
Mark Zuckerberg built a personal AI agent for tasks and is creating a digital version of himself for employee interaction.

History

Historical Context

Google bought London-based DeepMind for about £400 million on 26 January 2014, securing its deep-reinforcement learning expertise. In March 2016 DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated Go champion Lee Sedol, a milestone that highlighted AI’s potential. The same technology later cut Google data-centre cooling energy by up to 40 %, illustrating the commercial impact that now drives AI-centric strategies at firms like Meta and JPMorgan.

1 of 3

Meta Shares Plunge

Meta's shares fell more than 10%, wiping roughly $170 billion from its market value.
First-quarter revenue reached $56.31 billion, a 33% year-over-year increase and the strongest since 2021.
Daily active users slipped to 3.56 billion, missing the 3.62 billion forecast and down 20 million from the prior quarter.
JPMorgan cut Meta to Neutral, lowered its price target to $725, and announced the company will lay off about 8,000 staff, roughly 10% of employees.

1 / 3