Meta’s First Quarter Profit Soars 35%, Posts Second-Best Revenue Ever

Meta did not show any signs of an economic slowdown when it reported its first quarter earnings on Wednesday, with the parent company of Instagram and Facebook seeing its quarterly profit soar 35% compared to the same time a year ago. The company, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, also reported $42.31 in first quarter revenue, which was the second-best quarter in Meta’s history.

“We’ve had a strong start to an important year, our community continues to grow and our business is performing very well,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “We’re making good progress on AI glasses and Meta AI, which now has almost 1 billion monthly actives.”

Zuckerberg, on Meta’s earnings call on Wednesday, said he believes people will soon talk to personal AI bots “throughout the day” on their phones and AI-powered glasses. He added Meta is focused this year on “deepening the experience” users have with its AI technology.

Here are the key results:

Revenues: $42.31 billion, up 16% year-over-year and more than the $41.22 billion that was projected by analysts. As usual, most of Meta’s sales stemmed from ad revenue, which accounted for nearly 98% of its first quarter revenue.

Meta reported the average price of an ad on its platforms increased 10% year-over-year. Asia-Pacific and “Rest of World” were the two places where Meta’s sales increased from the previous quarter, while they dipped in the U.S. and Europe.

Net income: Meta reported $16.64 billion in net income, which was 35% higher than a year ago. Earnings per share of $6.43 topped the $65.22 EPS that analysts had projected, per Zack’s Investment Research.

The $16.64 billion profit was the second-best in Meta history, following the $20.84 billion it reported during the holiday quarter of 2024.

Daily active users: Daily users of one of Meta’s apps — which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads– climbed 6% annually to 3.43 billion. Zuckerberg, on the company’s earnings call, said Threads, its X-like platform, has 350 million monthly active users.

Notably, Reality Labs — Meta’s division focused on artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality technology — lost $4.21 billion between Jan. and March; Reality Labs continues to standout as the sector where Meta is spending more than it is making, after the company lost more than $17.5 billion on it last year.

Capital expenditures more than doubled from a year ago to $13.69 billion, as Meta continues to invest in data centers for AI.

Meta did not share any guidance on if it expects President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff plan to affect its business moving forward. CFO Susan Li, in a statement accompanying the first quarter report, said Meta was continuing to “monitor an active regulatory landscape, including legal and regulatory headwinds in the E.U. and U.S. that could significantly impact our business and our financial results.”

The Menlo Park, CA.-based company projected second quarter sales of between $42.50 billion and $45.50 billion. Li, on the company’s earnings call, said the guidance’s range is due to “uncertainty” in how the macro environment will respond to ongoing trade discussions.

It was a busy quarter for Meta, even by its own standards. The company started the year off by scrapping its third-party fact checking operation in favor of a feature similar to X’s Community Notes. Zuckerberg, during an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” in Jan., likened the Meta fact checking team to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “1984.”

“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Zuckerberg said.

That same month, Zuckerberg attended President Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., alongside other tech executives like Apple CEO Tim Cook Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; many of the president’s fans who were in town for the inauguration told TheWrap that they were skeptical of Zuckerberg’s suddenly-warm relationship with President Trump.

Other first quarter headlines for Meta include the company cutting 5% of its workforce to “move out low performers” and Zuckerberg saying the company would spend $60 billion-$65 billion this year to grow its artificial intelligence team and services; Meta updated that figure in its first quarter report on Wednesday, saying the company expected to spend up to $72 billion this year.

On the AI front, Meta released its standalone AI app to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other AI models, like X’s Grok, on Tuesday.

And after the first quarter wrapped, the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta started in mid-April. The FTC claims Meta’s purchase of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 helped it build a social media monopoly; Meta has argued it faces plenty of competition from apps like YouTube and TikTok. That case is currently ongoing.

Meta’s stock price heading into Wednesday afternoon was down 9.60% since the start of the year. As TheWrap reported earlier this week, that is not out of the ordinary for the Big Tech companies, as the “Magnificent 7” companies as they are called — Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Tesla and Nvidia — seeing $2.71 trillion cut from their combined valuations since the start of 2025. The company’s stock price jumped 5% in after-hours trading, following the release of its earnings report.

Something that stood out from Meta’s earnings call: Zuckerberg and Li did not mention President Trump or the word “tariff” once. On the company’s last earnings call in Jan., Zuckerberg had said it was nice to have American leaders who are “proud” of the country’s tech giants.

Looking ahead, Zuckerberg said he anticipates users will have a more active relationship with the content they watch. “In the near future, I think that we’re going to have content in our feeds that you an interact with and that it’ll interact back with you, rather than you just watching it,” he said.

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