Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., wears Orion augmented reality glasses during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, Sept. 25, 2024.
- ValueAct has a roughly $1 billion stake in Meta, according to people familiar with the matter.
- The activist fund's specific plans could not immediately be learned, but ValueAct CEO Mason Morfit is said to be broadly supportive of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's AI push.
- With a market cap of $1.5 trillion, Meta is the largest company ever to be targeted by a major activist.
Activist investor ValueAct has a $1 billion stake in Facebook parent Meta, according to people familiar with the matter.
The activist fund's specific plans could not immediately be learned, but one of the people said that ValueAct CEO Mason Morfit was supportive of Meta's broader efforts to invest in artificial intelligence.
Meta shares have grown at a rapid clip this year, outperforming the S&P 500 and peer companies. ValueAct has a long history of investing in technology companies, and is generally considered to be more constructivist and collaborative than other activist funds. It signed an information-sharing agreement with Disney, for example, as that company girded up for an activist battle with Nelson Peltz's Trian Partners.
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Meta is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It is one of the largest companies to be targeted by an activist investor, with a market cap of nearly $1.5 trillion.
Meta was previously targeted by Brad Gerstner's Altimeter Capital in 2022. Gerstner pushed the company to trim down its head count in a letter titled "Time to Get Fit."
ValueAct has taken stakes in a number of other mega-cap companies, including Salesforce, Disney and Microsoft. Morfit has also pushed for change at other, smaller technology companies, including Spotify.
Money Report
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
— CNBC's David Faber contributed to this report.
