Checking the stock price of facebook (well, Meta Platforms if we're being technical) has become a daily ritual for half of Silicon Valley and basically every retail investor with a phone. It’s wild. A few years back, everyone thought Mark Zuckerberg was lighting money on fire with the metaverse. Now? The stock is a beast, though it’s having a bit of a "wait and see" moment this January.
As of mid-day January 15, 2026, the stock is hovering around $622.86.
It’s been a choppy morning. We opened at roughly $618.48, and while it’s clawing back some gains, it’s still sitting about 20% off its all-time high of nearly $800. If you're looking for the ticker, remember it's META on the NASDAQ. Don't go looking for FB; that ship sailed a while ago.
Why the stock price of facebook is jumping around today
Markets hate uncertainty, and right now, Meta is handing out uncertainty by the bucketload. Yesterday, news leaked that they’re cutting about 1,500 people from the Reality Labs division. That’s the "metaverse" arm. On one hand, investors love seeing costs go down. On the other, it signals that the big VR dream might be hitting a reality check.
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Honestly, the real story isn't just the layoffs. It's the AI "tax." Meta is spending money like a drunken sailor on data centers. We're talking projections of over $100 billion in capital expenditures for 2026. That is a staggering amount of cash. To put that in perspective, they are essentially spending the entire GDP of a small country just to buy H100 and H200 chips to make sure Llama 4 and 5 are the smartest bots on the block.
The Numbers That Actually Matter
If you’re trying to figure out if the current stock price of facebook is a steal or a trap, you’ve gotta look past the daily fluctuations.
- P/E Ratio: It's sitting at roughly 27.5. For a company growing revenue at 20%+, that’s actually not "expensive" by historical tech standards.
- Market Cap: Roughly $1.57 Trillion. It’s firmly in the trillion-dollar club, trading blows with Amazon and Alphabet.
- Dividends: Yeah, they pay those now. It’s a tiny yield—about 0.34%—but it’s a signal that the company is "grown up."
What the bulls and bears are fighting about
You’ll hear analysts like Shmulik over at Bernstein calling Meta a "dark horse" for 2026. He’s got a price target of $870. His logic? Meta is better than anyone else at turning AI into actual dollars through ad targeting. If you’ve noticed the ads on your Instagram feed getting eerily specific lately, that’s the AI working. It drives "conversions," which makes advertisers happy to pay more.
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But then you have the skeptics. They look at the stock price of facebook and see a bubble. The European Union is still breathing down their neck with regulatory fines, and there’s a constant fear that TikTok (or whatever the next Gen Alpha app is) will finally start eating into Instagram's lunch. Plus, there’s the "onetime tax charge" mess from late 2025 that made their net income look wonky for a bit.
Is the Metaverse dead?
Sorta. But also no. The rebranding to Meta was a massive gamble. While the Quest headsets are selling "okay," they aren't the iPhone-level hit Zuckerberg wanted. The pivot back to "AI First" in 2025 was a defensive move that the market loved. The stock price of facebook doubled during that transition. Today's layoffs in the VR unit just confirm that the "Meta" in Meta Platforms is now more about Artificial Intelligence than walking around as a legless avatar in a digital office.
Practical steps for watching the META stock
If you're holding or thinking about buying, don't just stare at the price every five minutes. It'll drive you crazy.
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- Watch the Capex: The next earnings call is huge. If they raise their spending guidance for 2026 even higher, the stock might take a hit as people worry about margins.
- Check the Ad Load: Keep an eye on Threads. If Meta successfully starts monetizing Threads the way they did Instagram, that’s a whole new revenue stream that isn't fully baked into the price yet.
- Llama Progress: Meta's open-source AI strategy is their secret weapon. If Llama remains the industry standard for developers, they own the ecosystem without having to charge a subscription fee for it.
The current stock price of facebook reflects a company in the middle of a massive identity shift. It’s no longer just a social media site; it’s a massive AI infrastructure play that happens to own the world's biggest address book. Whether that's worth $600 or $1,000 depends entirely on if they can turn those billion-dollar chips into trillion-dollar profits.
Next steps for you: Look up Meta's upcoming Q4 2025 earnings date. Historically, the stock moves 5-10% in either direction the day after they report, especially if they comment on the 2026 "operating expense guide."