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meta As the company comes under increasing pressure to strengthen its position in artificial intelligence, the company is granting stock options to key leaders to retain talent.
Incentive plan executives include CFO Susan Lee, technology director Andrew Bosworth, chief product officer Christopher Cox and executive director Javier Oliván, according to an SEC filing released Tuesday night. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has a net worth of more than $200 billion, is not part of the plan.
The high strike price and relatively short timeline for achieving the target demonstrate Meta’s urgency to demonstrate progress in the rapidly growing AI market. On the other hand, OpenAI, Anthropic, google Meta, which has rolled out popular AI models and features, has struggled to find a coherent strategy even as it plans to spend up to $135 billion in capital this year.
“This is a big gamble,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “These salary packages will not materialize unless Meta is highly successful in the future and benefits all of our stockholders. Like all stock options, they only have value if the stock price significantly exceeds the exercise price, and in this case it must be aligned with a very aggressive five-year timeline.”
Meta’s stock price has fallen about 4% over the past year, lagging behind all other mega-cap tech companies. microsoftdown 5%. Meanwhile, Alphabet soared 73%, driven by the success of its Gemini AI portfolio.
Meta’s stock price must reach $1,116.08 for the first tranche of options to be paid. That’s up 88% from Tuesday’s closing price and equates to a market cap of about $2.82 trillion based on current outstanding shares.
The next tranche requires a stock price of $1,393.87. The price increases significantly with each additional tranche, topping out at $3,727.12, valuing the company at more than $9 trillion. The most valuable company in the world today is Nvidia Approximately $4.3 trillion.
Meta spent 2025 overhauling its AI unit after the release of the Llama 4 family of AI models failed to attract third-party developers. As part of its AI makeover, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI in June and hired company CEO Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer to lead the AI division, now known as Meta Superintelligence Labs.
CNBC reported in December that Meta was pursuing a new Llama successor, a frontier AI model codenamed Avocado.
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