• Meta established a new class of stock to ensure Mark Zuckerberg stayed as CEO.
• The stock class will "continue the founder-led model that has driven the company," Meta said in its third-quarter earnings.
• Zuckerberg has taken a leading position in Meta's AI era.

Meta's board wants Mark Zuckerberg to stick around.

The company announced a new category of non-voting Class C stock in its third-quarter earnings report. It listed several reasons for creating the new class — one of which is to keep the CEO in control.

A Special Committee established by Meta's board determined that Zuckerberg was the best fit to lead the company into its future, and highlighted the CEO's creative vision and management abilities.

"The creation of the Class C common stock will continue the founder-led model that has driven the company's success since its inception," Meta said.

The stock class will also provide Meta the ability to finance its growth, the earnings report said. Meta is spending big on AI and the data centers needed to power it. The company reported $34.91 billion in third-quarter capital expenditures.

Meta's press release said the distribution would effectively amount to a two-for-one stock split for existing shareholders. Susan Li, Meta's chief financial officer, said that the stock will be distributed to existing shareholders.

Other tech companies have issued stock to access new capital without diluting their CEO's voting power. Google performed a stock split in 2012 for a similar reason. Semafor was first to report the new stock class.

Zuckerberg has long been the face of Meta. He's strengthened his leadership through the AI boom, going "startup mode" and getting hands-on with the tech. The company's AI team set up their desks around where Zuckerberg sits.

The success of Muse, Meta's AI agent, has raised the profile of another Meta executive: Alexandr Wang. The chief AI officer has joined Zuckerberg for podcasts and spoken onstage at keynotes.

A Financial Times profile last week touted Wang as a "potential successor to Zuckerberg." It's clear the board wants Zuckerberg there for the long haul.

• Meta spent $34.91 billion in capital expenditures in its third quarter.
• The company is spending big on data centers and other infrastructure for its AI development.
• Meta predicted $135-145 billion in capex for 2026, aligning with analyst expectations.

Meta is making it rain for AI.

The company spent $34.91 billion in capital expenditures during the third quarter of 2026. That's up from the second quarter's sum, $31.08 billion.

For the year 2026, Meta said it expects to spend between $135-145 billion in capital expenditures, narrowed from its prediction of $130-145 billion last quarter.

Meta's forecast includes the yearly capex prediction that analysts expected: $139.79 billion.

As Meta bets big on AI, it is investing heavily in its development. It has built massive, costly data centers and spent big on computing power.

The spending uptick was expected. On the "Cheeky Pint" podcast earlier this month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recounted early conversations about the investment — and said he'd bet up to $200 billion on AI, before he knew the models would work.

Investors haven't loved Meta's massive capex forecasts in past quarters. The stock tumbled almost 10% last quarter after earnings per share missed Wall Street estimates, and sank 6% the quarter before on raised capex guidance.

This quarter, Meta has a new hero product: Muse.

The AI assistant has reached over 2 million daily users and 3 million downloads. It quickly scaled the App Store. Muse users told Business Insider they chatted with it to help plan trips and ace exams.

The energy around the company is ebullient, as Alexandr Wang, Meta's chief AI officer, continues to post memes of Muse's squishy-looking mascot.

At Meta's Connect keynote event in September, Zuckerberg said Muse "has a novel business model."

"We believe that Muse will make you money, and we're standing behind this by making Muse free for a huge number of tokens with the expectation that over time, we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions," he said.

Muse could help justify the capex guidance for some investors. The stock was trading up 4.12% after-hours at the time of publication.

• Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley said the company's acquisition paid $0 to equity holders.
• "I am sorry the Foursquare story ended in such a way," he wrote to employees.
• Crowley said the company decayed after a private equity investment.

Foursquare's acquisition left its cofounder sad and angry.

Dennis Crowley helped launch the location technology company in 2009. Seventeen years later, Foursquare was acquired by Infillion. Crowley wrote on Substack that one point of the acquisition left him "heartbroken."

Foursquare's acquisition earned equity holders exactly $0, Crowley wrote, with no money offered for preferred or common stock.

"To our ~1600 former employees over 17 years, I am sorry the Foursquare story ended in such a way that makes it seem like our collective efforts were worth… nothing?" Crowley wrote.

Crowley left the CEO role in 2016, though he continued to lead Foursquare's research and development lab through 2021. After that, Crowley kept a seat on the board.

Foursquare raised capital from The Raine Group, a private equity firm, in 2019. Less than two years later, Gary Little became CEO. Little was one of The Raine Group's managing directors.

"Leadership was unable to preserve the value it inherited or create new value during those six years," Crowley wrote.

Foursquare employees reached out to Crowley to express their frustrations with leadership, he wrote. He cited the company's Glassdoor reviews, which rate it 2.1 stars out of 5. The Raine Group did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Crowley also wrote that the $0 equity outcome was buried in a 125-page PDF for Foursquare's legal team. "No single individual stood up to own (or even acknowledge) the outcome," he wrote.

Calynn Krieger, an executive vice president of marketing for Infillion, told Business Insider in an email that Foursquare had "remarkable technology and a talented team."

"We have nothing to say about Foursquare's former leadership, but we're glad the business and its value continue, and we're committed to creating even more of it," Krieger said.

The lesson Crowley learned

Crowley took responsibility for his role in the lead-up to Foursquare's $0 outcome for equity holders. His decisions as CEO led to the need for a private equity investment, Crowley wrote, and he said he wished he were louder on the board.

His takeaway: "Maybe the biggest mistake I've made in my career is falling in love with this company."

Crowley was too loyal to "making it work," he wrote, and stayed longer than he should have. "Watching the company slowly decay has been a grind on my soul," he wrote.

In a footnote, Crowley gave founders a piece of advice.

"It's okay to fall in love with the company you're building, but don't deny yourself the ability to get closure and move on just because the company itself hasn't yet experienced an exit or ending," he wrote.

• Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue isn't a fan of the Netflix documentary about his company's hack by OpenAI's AI agents.
• Netflix released a short documentary called "AI Gone Wild" in October.
• Delangue, who was interviewed for the project, called the result "super disappointing."

Clément Delangue isn't wild about Netflix's new documentary.

Delangue cofounded Hugging Face, an AI startup acquired by Nvidia for almost $13 billion in September. Two months prior, Hugging Face became the face of AI risk when rogue OpenAI agents hacked the business.

The hacking saga sparked a Netflix documentary titled "AI Gone Wild." On Tuesday, Delangue criticized the so-called "instadoc" in a lengthy X post.

"Super disappointing, as they went for maximum anthropomorphism of the technology and full doomer mode," Delangue wrote.

Delangue sat for an interview in the documentary, along with a METR researcher, the director of the AI Futures Project, and two tech journalists.

In the X post, Delangue wrote that he spent over two hours trying to correct what he described as the documentary's mistakes. He wanted to explain that AI agents were "technological systems, not aliens."

"It looks like the drive to scare people for maximum views was too strong," Delangue wrote.

Delangue listed some things the Netflix documentary omitted: the lack of agent containment, how safeguards for OpenAI's closed model blocked Hugging Face's defense, how Hugging Face defended itself with an open model, and "that we still lack a lot of information and transparency including full agent traces and that companies need to remain accountable for what their agents do."

Netflix did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Some techies responded to Delangue's post with their own criticism of the documentary. Alex Imas, Google DeepMind's director of AGI economics, called Delangue's post "important reading."

Brigitte Tousignant, Hugging Face's head of communications, posted on X that the documentary widened the gap between the public's understanding of AI and how it actually works.

Tousignant wrote to Netflix: "If you can't tell this story responsibly in 26 minutes, maybe 26 minutes isn't enough."

Despite his criticism, Delangue suggested a way to frame the project to make it an enjoyable watch: "It ends up being a fun sci-fi movie though!"

• Tech companies and venture capital firms are hosting private screenings of the Elizabeth Holmes doc.
• I went to one hosted by the AI startup Extend.
• Attendees I talked to said they looked at Holmes more as a joke than a product of their industry.

Elizabeth Holmes is a black mark on Silicon Valley's reputation. And yet its residents are lining up for the documentary about her.

Tech companies across the US are hosting screenings of "You Can See Everything," the documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Holmes and her fiancé, Billy Evans. Venture capital funds are bringing their founders to the movie. There are Luma events upon Luma events.

The irony, of course, is that Holmes makes tech look bad. She sold big dreams with her medical testing company, Theranos, which eventually came crashing down. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. (She has long said that she is innocent.)

Holmes is the exemplar of Silicon Valley's hucksterism. She's who much of America points to when they call founders liars or scammers.

So, what's with all the tech love? I went to a Thursday screening of the documentary hosted by Extend, an AI documentation startup, to find out.

Inside the Extend screening

A swarm of techies crowded outside theater nine at New York's AMC Lincoln Square.

The screening was set to start at 7. By 6:40, a crowd had formed to talk shop and admire Extend's custom stickers. Outside the theater door, I met Bo Lau, the event's organizer who works in developer relations for Extend.

Lau recently moved to New York and said she didn't want to watch the documentary alone. So, she posted about it on X — and it helped that she already had a following on so-called "Tech Twitter."

"I was like, 'What if I just turn this into a work event so I can expense it?'" Lau said.

The event got 1,400 RSVPs for about 120 seats, she said, and she's flying to San Francisco soon to host another screening. The tickets were given out free, so Extend got no benefit other than brand awareness, she said.

Why was it so popular? Lau said that Holmes was a source of fascination within Silicon Valley, and that Fielder's "awkward humor" matched the awkwardness of tech.

Filing into the theater, I heard my seatmates chat about AI and which tech companies let you work from home. On a brief social media scroll before my three-hour Do Not Disturb, I spotted Lau's recent project: a simulator of Holmes' desk.

Holmes' X account responded: "Impressive project."

Laugh lines, reflection time

This was my second time watching the documentary; the first was at New York Film Festival. The reactions among the techier crowd were mostly the same. There were lots of laughs, both at Fielder's discomfort and Holmes' oddities.

The crowd didn't react strongly to (mild spoiler alert) the big, AI version of Holmes that her fiancé creates after she goes to jail. That struck me as curious; maybe the tech crowd is already used to AI replicas.

There was also a much stronger gasp at the reveal of who's running Holmes' X account. That wasn't shocking; the attendees found out about this screening through X, after all.

We walked to a local wine bar, sipping cocktails while debriefing the film. Two techies that I talked to were split. One came away feeling bad for Holmes, then feeling bad that he felt bad for her. Another thought the film certified that Holmes was a true and utter psychopath.

I asked: Why is tech so comfortable laughing at Holmes? Her boastful visions don't sound too different from those of the current crop of young AI founders.

Maybe it was because the crowd was mostly in their 20s, not yet working in startups when Holmes' reckoning came.

Or Holmes has been detached from her Silicon Valley roots. The techies seemed to view her as more a product of the media — the books, the tabloid stories, the Hulu show — than of their own industry.

One attendee put it to me bluntly: she's turned into a meme.