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Mark Zuckerberg was busy this year.
He allocated billions to keep Meta competitive in the AI race.
He worked to thaw out a frosty relationship with President-elect Donald Trump and likely caused Apple to sweat over Meta's flashy smart glasses demo.
And he debuted a new look that many on social media applauded as more relatable.
In short, as 2024 comes to a close, Zuckerberg and Meta have plenty of cause for celebration.
Meta's stock is up 66% year-to-date, and Zuckerberg is more than $84 billion richer today than he was at the start of this year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The company reported an earnings beat in every quarter (though some were followed by brief stock drops) and declared its first-ever dividend in February.
"From a bird's-eye view, all in all, it was a successful year for Meta," said Minda Smiley, a senior analyst at EMarketer, a sister company to Business Insider. "Despite the massive amounts of spending they've been doing, they were still able to have growth each quarter in their earnings."
Meta made headway on a number of products this year.
The company said in September that its Meta AI chatbot is on track to be the most-used AI assistant in the world by year's end. The company also announced new versions of its AI model Llama in April and has continued releasing improved models, including Llama 3.3, which came out earlier this month.
"Meta's sheer size paired with its AI capabilities have really been a boon for them this year," said Smiley. "Advertisers are already spending so much, they were even before the AI really took off, and this has only really supercharged that."
It was also a big year for the company's hardware business.
At the company's annual Meta Connect developer conference, it unveiled its Quest 3S mixed-reality headset. Meanwhile, Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses got AI features like the ability to help wearers remember things and translate speech in real time, and the company debuted a prototype of its first augmented-reality glasses, called Orion, at Connect, though they're not yet for sale.
The flashy Orion announcements signaled to developers and antsy investors where Meta's vast R&D spending on smart glasses was going. Wall Street was impressed; Meta's stock hit a record high coming off of Connect, though the record has since been broken again. Citi analysts called the newest Ray-Bans a "must buy." Jefferies analysts wrote that Connect left them "more bullish on Meta's consumer & enterprise AI opportunities."
"I still think there's a long way to go from the consumer adoption perspective and even just what they're actually doing with their technology, but they're certainly making strides and trying to really illustrate the real world use cases," said Smiley. But "regardless of what Meta does on their end, a lot of it is going to depend on if and when regular people are ready to use some of this."
Meta has faced some setbacks this year, though, largely in court and tied to past scandals.
After the Supreme Court denied Meta's appeal in November, the company will have to face a multibillion-dollar class-action lawsuit from investors alleging Meta misled shareholders regarding the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal. The company earlier this month agreed to a settlement of $50 million Australian dollars, or roughly $31 million US dollars, for Facebook users in Australia impacted by the scandal.
In the US, Meta will pay Texas $1.4 billion to settle claims the company unlawfully captured the biometric data of millions of the state's residents without their knowledge or consent through a tagging suggestions feature that rolled out in 2011.
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Apart from Meta's success, it's also been a good year for Zuckerberg as the face of the company.
He helped sell out part of a stadium for a taping of a live podcast episode in which he spoke in front of around 6,000 people. During the appearance, he said his "20-year mistake" was taking responsibility for issues he felt Meta wasn't to blame.
Now, he said he's done apologizing.
His image transformation continued this year as he introduced graphic tees with Latin, gold chain necklaces, and flashy watches into his wardrobe.
Though some of his shirts are custom-made and his outfits can cost thousands of dollars, compared to the suit-and-tie era of Zuck 1.0, his tees and chains make him appear "more accessible," which makes him look "relatable to his customer base," says Joseph Rosenfeld, an image consultant whose clientele includes business executives and Silicon Valley elites.
Zuck also seemed to win over some people when he commissioned a 7-foot statue of his wife, surfed with a beer and American flag in hand to celebrate the Fourth of July, and released a cover of "Get Low" with T-Pain.
As The Information asked in May, "Wait, when did Mark Zuckerberg get cool?"
Taken together, the past year was one of change as the company leaned away from frequently talking about the metaverse and into AI.
In public and behind the scenes, Zuckerberg also carefully positioned himself for the next presidential administration.
"Meta as a company may not exactly be in turmoil, and neither is he personally, but there's a lot rolling and shifting and changing with the nature of the business right now — how it is growing, where is it going," said Rosenfeld. "And he is a reflection of exactly that kind of growth that is happening within the company; things are not exactly settled right now."
Zuckerberg notably declined to endorse a candidate for US president and dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month. The Meta CTO is "very keen" to play a role in his tech policymaking (whether or not he'll have Trump's ear like Elon Musk has yet to be seen).
Meta also seemingly kicked off the trend of major companies and CEOs donating $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund.
And in a move that signals Meta's lobbying ability in a new political era, the company also recently scored a big win in Congress when the Kids Online Safety Act failed to pass. Meta poured almost $19 million into federal lobbying efforts in the first nine months of the year.
So what does 2025 have in store for Zuck and Meta?
The company might focus more on potential opportunities with WhatsApp, which it's mostly just "kept in its back pocket over the years," Smiley says.
Meta in June ran an ad for the messaging platform that featured the cast of "Modern Family." The following month, Meta announced it had notched 100 million monthly active users in the US on WhatsApp.
Meta may also try to draw more digital creators to Instagram, especially as TikTok's future in the US remains uncertain amid the DOJ's ongoing case that threatens to shutter the app's domestic business.
It'll also likely continue trying to convince more people to defect from Elon Musk's X over to Threads, which recently hit 275 million monthly active users.
Zuckerberg said in December that "next year is a big year for Meta glasses" and predicted that "glasses will be the next major computing platform."
And no one will be surprised to see AI remain top-of-mind for Meta in 2025.
While the company plans to continue to extend the spirit of its "year of efficiency" that Zuckerberg announced in 2023, don't expect it to pinch any pennies when it comes to AI spending in the new year.
Meta estimated its capital expenditures for 2024 would be $38 to $40 billion, up significantly from its total of $28.10 billion last year, driven largely by spending on AI — and it expects the heavy spending to continue as it further integrates AI into its suite of products and invests in related infrastructure.
"It's something that investors are always sort of on their toes about, but Mark has been good about kind of tempering those worries," said Smiley. "As long as their advertising business remains strong and can almost provide a buffer to some of this, that will make investors feel more at ease, and clearly they're still having a lot of strength there."
For Zuckerberg, the past year of flexing the strength of Meta's business and doubling down on the AI race means he's heading into 2025 with something he hasn't always had: momentum.
