Meta stock was trading slightly in the green on Wednesday, in line with the broader market moves.
The stock was up around 0.31% to trade at $699.15 shortly after market open on Wednesday.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 54 points, or 0.1%. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite also added 0.1% each.
The gains followed a weak session on Tuesday, when mounting tensions between Israel and Iran weighed on investor sentiment.
Meta’s stock move comes today as the social media giant received a massive price target raise.
Why Cantor Fitzgerald is bullish on Meta
Cantor Fitzgerald raised its price target on Meta Platforms to $807 from $676 on Wednesday, reiterating an Overweight rating.
The upward revision comes after Meta confirmed plans to introduce advertising on WhatsApp, including Promoted Channels and Status ads.
The new ad formats are designed to preserve the platform’s core messaging functionality by avoiding intrusion into the chat interface.
WhatsApp currently sees over 3 billion monthly active users globally, including 100 million in the US, as disclosed during Meta’s first-quarter earnings call.
Additional metrics cited from the FTC vs Meta trial show WhatsApp’s high engagement levels, with an 82% monthly-to-daily active user ratio, and each daily user reportedly viewing around 50 stories per day.
Meta also reported that 1.5 billion users access the Updates tab daily.
Cantor Fitzgerald estimates that if WhatsApp reaches an ad load of just 5%—roughly one-quarter of Instagram and Facebook’s current levels—the new monetization could add mid-single-digit growth to Meta’s EBIT and EPS by fiscal 2027.
Sam Altman says Meta offered $100 million bonuses to poach OpenAI staff
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed that Meta Platforms offered signing bonuses of up to $100 million in an aggressive bid to recruit engineers from his company—an approach he called “crazy” and reflective of the escalating talent war in the artificial intelligence sector.
Speaking on Uncapped, a podcast hosted by his brother Jack Altman, the OpenAI chief said Meta has been targeting top engineers at OpenAI with unprecedented compensation packages.
“They started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” Altman said in the interview released Tuesday.
“You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that in compensation per year. So far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”
Altman’s comments come amid growing competition among tech giants to secure elite AI talent.
Just days ago, Meta disclosed a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, a data-labelling company integral to training advanced AI models.
In a further escalation, Meta hired Scale AI founder and CEO Alexandr Wang to head its new “superintelligence” group—a unit focused on frontier AI research and directly overseen by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
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