Meta boosts top executives’ pay with stock options as AI race heats up

Facebook's Meta logo sign is seen at the company headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar)

Meta Platforms has offered top executives stock options that could pay out hundreds of millions of dollars and are tied to lifting its valuation six-fold to more than US$9 trillion, in a bid to retain talent and spur aggressive growth in the AI era.

The options are the social media giant’s first for its top brass and require steep stock milestones. They suggest Big Tech is rethinking incentives as it pours hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers and departs from its long-standing reluctance to raise debt to gain an edge in the AI race.

Meta’s stock will have to rise at least 88.2 per cent from Tuesday’s closing price of $592.92 to $1,116.08 to unlock the lowest-priced tranche of stock options.

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A more than six-fold jump would be needed to unlock the most aggressive tranche, requiring the company’s shares to rise as high as $3,727.12, regulatory filings late on Tuesday showed.

At that level, Meta would have a market value of more than $9 trillion, much higher than Nvidia - currently the world’s most valuable company with a valuation of $4.257 trillion.

Meta must meet the price targets by Feb. 14, 2028, for the options to vest. If unsuccessful, Meta executives’ unvested options would become available to them in installments through August 15, 2030. The options will expire in March 2031 if they are unexercised.

Tesla has offered similar options to CEO Elon Musk that will pay out around $1 trillion if some operational targets are hit.

Meta’s plan does not include its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

CFO Susan Li, technology head Andrew Bosworth, product chief Chris Cox, operations boss Javier Olivan, President Dina Powell McCormick and Chief Legal Officer Curtis Mahoney are eligible for the options, the regulatory filings showed.

All executives except McCormick and Mahoney, who joined Meta in January, will also receive an increase in restricted stock awards worth a total $170 million at last close, which vest quarterly. Chief Accounting Officer Aaron Anderson will only receive restricted stock.

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The company has offered huge pay packages, some worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the years, to court top AI researchers to a new superintelligence team.

A Meta spokesperson said the pay packages represent a “big bet” and that they “will not be realized unless Meta achieves massive future success, benefiting all of our shareholders.”

(Reporting by Mrinmay Dey and Chris Thomas in Mexico City, Katie Paul in New York, Shubham Kalia, Shivani Tanna and Gursimran Kaur in Bengaluru; Editing by Jacqueline Wong, Thomas Derpinghaus and Maju Samuel)