$10,000 Invested in Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta a Decade Ago Is Worth This Much Today
Daniel Sparks, The Motley Fool
Sun, July 12, 2026 at 10:03 PM GMT+5:30
5 min read
- META
+5.97% - NVDA
+4.03%
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
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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
