At Meta , Mark Zuckerberg 's company, the C-Level executives could play an even more essential role in raising the company's valuation to US$9 trillion, which would represent an increase of approximately 500% compared to the company's current market value of US$1.5 trillion.
The company's strategy is to encourage them to expand their business at an extremely accelerated pace with a new stock option program, which could generate billions of dollars more for Meta.
With this initiative, C-level executives will only be able to fully sell their stock options if the company reaches its expected market capitalization by 2031, according to documents filed with the SEC by Meta.
This group of executives who have access to the program includes Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan, Chief Financial Officer Susan Li, Chief Legal Officer CJ Mahoney, and Vice President Dina Powell McCormick.
Zuckerberg, the company's CEO, is not part of that select group.
“This is a big gamble. These compensation packages will only materialize if Meta achieves massive future success, benefiting all of our shareholders,” a company spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal . “Like all stock options, there is only value if the stock price significantly exceeds the exercise price — and in this case, that needs to happen within an extremely aggressive five-year timeframe.”
The news comes at a costly time for Meta. Over the past few years, the race for artificial intelligence has caused the company's stock-based compensation costs to skyrocket. By 2025 alone, the company had created several recruitment programs for AI researchers that, on their own, offered packages with returns exceeding $1 billion.
According to an analysis by the WSJ , cash costs directly related to stock awards consumed 96% of Meta's free cash flow in 2025, representing US$42 billion.
During the period, the company reported $18.4 billion in withheld taxes on acquired shares and spent approximately $23.6 billion on share buybacks to offset dilution.
In total, 40 million shares were repurchased last year, 90% of which were needed to reduce dilution caused by employee incentives.
This strategy seems to be becoming common in the market. At Tesla , the attempt to secure the loyalty of AI executives also involves a robust compensation program. In 2025, Elon Musk , the company's CEO, had a package of up to US$1 trillion approved by the board of directors.
To unlock this value, Musk needs to grow Tesla's valuation from $1.2 trillion to $8.5 trillion in ten years, twice the time stipulated by Meta.
