Meta revealed in SEC filings on Tuesday that it had granted stock options to six of its top executives, the first such grants since the company’s initial public offering in 2012. Hours later, laid off approximately 700 employees in Reality Labs, recruiting, sales and Facebook. The options are worthless unless Meta’s market capitalization reaches $9 trillion by March 2031, roughly six times its current valuation of about $1.5 trillion. If he does, four of the six executives will earn up to $921 million each.
The juxtaposition was not subtle and did not go unnoticed by employees. Meta’s own workforce has spent the last two years absorbing successive rounds of cutsreduced stock compensation for rank-and-file staff and a corporate message that emphasizes efficiency and performance above all else. Executive option grants tell a different story: one in which company leadership is incentivized to pursue a growth goal so ambitious that achieving it would make Meta the most valuable company in history by a considerable margin.
The structure of the awards.
The six recipients are Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer; Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer; Javier Olivan, operational director; Susan Li, chief financial officer; Jennifer Newstead, Chief Legal Officer; and Naomi Gleit, product manager. According to an Equilar analysis published by The New York Times, Bosworth, Cox and Olivan could each receive up to $921 million if all tranches are consolidated. Li’s package is valued at up to $161 million. Mark Zuckerberg, who controls the company through his super-voting shares, is not included.
Options are granted in tranches linked to share price thresholds. The first tranche requires Meta shares to reach $1,116.08, roughly double its current price. The final tranche requires $3,727.12, which corresponds to the market cap target of $9 trillion. All options expire in March 2031, giving executives five years to achieve goals. If the shares never reach the first threshold, the awards pay nothing.
Meta has framed grants as retention tools, and that framing is not entirely implausible. The AI talent market has reached extraordinary levels: Meta itself has reportedly offered packages worth up to $300 million over four years to retain top AI researchers, according to Fortune and TechCrunch. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic compete for the same pool of technical and C-suite executive talent. Losing a CTO or CPO to a rival during a period of intense investment in AI would be costly.
The cost structure behind the objective.
Reaching a $9 trillion valuation would require Meta to grow at a compound annual rate of about 35 percent over five years. To put it in context, Apple, the most valuable public company today, is worth approximately $3.5 trillion. No company has ever reached $9 trillion. Goal would need to more than double Apple’s current valuation.
The path to that goal goes through artificial intelligence. Meta has committed to capital spending of between $115 billion and $135 billion in 2026, an increase of about 75 percent from the previous year, almost all of it directed at AI infrastructure: data centers, custom chips and computing required to train and serve their models. The company is betting that AI will transform its advertising business, drive new products in augmented and virtual reality, and generate entirely new revenue streams that do not yet exist.
This bet has a cost that is already visible in the company’s finances. In 2025, Meta’s cash costs related to stock-based employee compensation reached approximately $42 billion, consuming approximately 96 percent of its $43.6 billion in free cash flow. Stock-based compensation is a non-cash expense on the income statement, but the dilution it creates and the cash costs associated with withholding taxes and buybacks to offset the dilution are real. When a company’s stock awards consume almost all of its free cash flow, the margin of error in its growth projections is greatly reduced.
The Two-Tier Workforce
The executive option grants were disclosed in a context that makes them politically difficult to defend. Meta reduced stock-based compensation for rank-and-file employees by five percent in 2025, following a 10 percent cut the previous year. The 700 layoffs announced the same day the options were presented were the second round of cuts this year. And the company’s broader restructuring over the past three years has eliminated more than 20,000 positions.
The message to employees is clear, even if Meta wouldn’t put it this way: the company’s most valuable asset is its senior management, and it is willing to pay whatever it takes to retain them. Everything else is a variable cost to optimize. This is not an unusual position for a large technology company, but it is rarely expressed as clearly as Meta said on Tuesday.
The comparison with Tesla is instructive. Elon Musk’s 2018 compensation package, originally valued at $56 billion and tied to market capitalization milestones, was twice rescinded by a Delaware court before Tesla’s board of directors awarded him a separate interim package of $29 billion in 2025. Legal and governance battles over Musk’s pay consumed years of board attention and shareholder goodwill. Meta’s option structure is smaller in absolute terms but similar in design: It ties executives’ wealth to a valuation target so large that achieving it would justify almost any payout.
Whether the $9 trillion goal is a serious strategic objective or an aspirational figure designed to make option grants appear performance-based rather than free is a question that only time will answer. What’s already clear is that Meta decided to make its biggest executive compensation commitment in more than a decade during the same week it told 700 employees their roles were no longer needed. Company leaders seem to believe that the tension between those two decisions is a price worth paying for the talent they want to keep. Employees who were laid off could reasonably disagree.
