Key Points
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Meta’s stock averaged about $116 per share in 2016 and trades near $670 today.
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A $10,000 investment made a decade ago would be worth about $58,000 today, dividends included.
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The company’s revenue grew 33% year over year in its most recent quarter — an acceleration from 24% the quarter before.
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Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) just closed out quite an eventful week. Shares of the social media giant jumped about 6% on Friday alone as investors warm back up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive artificial intelligence (AI) strategy.
The company has given them plenty to work with this year. Growth is accelerating, its new AI lab released its first model this spring, and capital spending guidance now tops $125 billion.
But let’s zoom out for a second. How has the stock done over the long haul? Specifically, how much would $10,000 invested in Meta a decade ago be worth today?
How the math works out
In 2016, Meta — then still called Facebook — traded at an average price of about $116 per share. A $10,000 investment at that price would have bought about 86 shares. With the stock trading near $670 as of this writing, those shares would be worth roughly $57,600 today, a nearly sixfold gain.
And dividends sweeten the total a little. Meta initiated its first-ever dividend in early 2024 at $0.50 per share quarterly, and the quarterly payout now stands at $0.525 per share. Those 86 shares would have collected a bit over $400 in dividends so far, bringing the total value to about $58,000.
That works out to a compound annual growth rate of about 19%.
The engine hasn’t slowed
Of course, none of that return is available to anyone buying today. What matters now is whether the business that produced it is still performing.
What impresses me most is that ten years in, Meta’s growth is accelerating, not fading. Revenue rose 22% in 2025 to $201.0 billion, and the growth rate stepped up through the year, from 24% year over year in the fourth quarter to 33% in the first quarter of 2026, when revenue hit $56.3 billion. The formula hasn’t changed, either. The company sells more ads, at higher prices, across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Ad impressions rose 19% year over year in the first quarter, the average price per ad rose 12%, and an average of 3.56 billion people used at least one of Meta’s apps each day in March.
All that advertising produces enormous profits. Meta’s first-quarter operating income rose 30% year over year to $22.9 billion. And shareholders are seeing plenty of the cash. The company spent over $26 billion on share repurchases in 2025, paid another approximately $5 billion in dividends and dividend equivalents, and still ended the year with more than $81 billion in cash and marketable securities.
And the company is spending like it believes the next decade holds more. Meta recently raised its 2026 guidance for capital expenditures to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion, much of it aimed at AI infrastructure. Its second-quarter outlook, meanwhile, calls for revenue of $58 billion to $61 billion.
“We had a milestone quarter with strong momentum across our apps and the release of our first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs,” said Zuckerberg in the company’s first-quarter earnings release.
That spending is also the market’s biggest worry about the stock. If the AI investments don’t pay off in continued growth, today’s expense ramp could weigh on profits for years to come. This past week, at least, investors treated the spending as a positive.
Should investors expect a repeat?
Sure, the backtest is fun. But nobody should buy Meta stock expecting another 19% a year for a decade. The company is vastly larger today than it was in 2016, and growth can get harder with size. Additionally, competition for attention and ad dollars isn’t easing, and regulators around the world continue to scrutinize the company.
But the stock’s price doesn’t demand a repeat, either. Shares trade at about 19 times forward earnings — a reasonable multiple for a company that just grew revenue 33% year over year — even accounting for the risks of a $125 billion-plus spending plan. That valuation multiple, of course, could come down if growth slows, but this multiple also hardly assumes another decade of dominance.
After all, the lesson of the decade-long backtest isn’t that Meta was a once-in-a-generation bargain in 2016. It’s that an enormously profitable business kept compounding while plenty of investors found reasons to sell along the way.
For long-term investors, I think Meta remains a solid holding today. I just wouldn’t let a $58,000 backtest set my expectations for the next ten years.
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Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
