A Script for Mark Zuckerberg

Listen to Podcast The setting: Meta’s earnings call in early August, 2026. The speaker: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to Meta Platforms’ Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, which are based on assumptions as of today. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various factors, including those set forth in today’s earnings press release and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. I know it’s weird that I, Mark Zuckerberg, am doing the Director of Investor Relations job, but anything is possible when this speech is made up. What follows isn’t actually me: it’s what Ben Thompson of Stratechery thinks I should say on this call. I know that Meta and myself are facing a lot of questions about AI, particularly the amount of money we are spending on capex. Our core business is an asset-light cash generation machine, so why are we spending tens of billions of dollars on AI? To answer this question I want to give you a quick recount of our history, what I’ve learned, and why I am so confident that we are doing the right thing for our future. So let’s get to it. A Brief History of Facebook Facebook was, as you know, the digital representation of Harvard’s analog Face Books. What was clear from the very first day we went live was the extent to which humans are, first and foremost, interested in other humans. People would spend hours clicking around to people’s pages. To put it another way, our first algorithm was human curiosity. What truly super-charged Facebook usage, however — and which transformed the Internet — was the feed. Now, instead of actively surfing to friends’ pages to look for an update, we showed updates to you in a single feed on your homepage. You might remember that we got a lot of heat for this decision, including protestors outside our office in Palo Alto. The lesson we took from that, however, is one that has guided us to this day: first, the revealed preference of users, as captured by data, was that they loved the feed: engagement skyrocketed. Second, we learned to trust our own — my own — product intuition, and that conviction has served us well over the years.