Meta Platforms recently disclosed a new stock option plan for its top executives that won’t pay out unless the company’s market cap skyrockets from roughly $1.36 trillion to $9 trillion by 2031.
That would make Meta worth more than twice Nvidia‘s value, currently the world’s most valuable company at around $4.1 trillion.
For dividend stock investors watching Meta, the new plan provides a signal about where the company is betting its future and how confident it is getting there.
Meta’s executive compensation plan: the $9 trillion bet
The new compensation plan covers six of Meta’s top executives, including Chief Financial Officer Susan Li, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan, and Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.
According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, each executive could unlock options worth up to $625.6 million if Meta hits the $9 trillion target, with the total potentially rising to $921 million per executive when accounting for restricted stock units, per a report from Fortune.
The program is a “big bet” that will only reward executives if the company achieves “massive future success, benefiting all of our shareholders,” a Meta spokesperson said in a CNBC interview.
The plan also comes with urgency baked in. For just the first tranche of options to pay out, Meta’s stock would need to reach $1,116.08, an 100+% increase from current levels.
And the clock is ticking.
Meta’s dividend stock case
Meta initiated its first-ever dividend in early 2024, marking a turning point for the stock. It has since become one of the more interesting income plays among mega-cap technology companies.
Key dividend metrics for META stock:
- Dividend per share (2025 actual): $2.10
- Dividend per share (2026 estimate): $2.24 (+6.9% year over year)
- Dividend expense (2026 estimate): $5.66 billion
- Dividend per share (2030 estimate): $3.81
- Dividend CAGR (2025–2030): 12.6%
- Free cash flow per (2026 estimate): $10.85 billion
- Dividend payout ratio (2026 estimate): About 50%
The free cash flow trajectory is what stands out most. Analysts expect it to drop sharply in 2026, down 75.1% year over year, as Meta pours capital into data centers, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and custom chips.
But the same forecasts show free cash flow bouncing back sharply, more than doubling by 2028 and pushing toward$119 billion by 2030.
That recovery story is the foundation of the dividend stock case.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is excluded from the executive compensation plan.
AI is driving the core business
Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in early March, Meta CFO Susan Li laid out a detailed picture of how AI is already moving the needle.
She pointed to a Facebook ranking improvement that produced a 7% lift in organic content views, calling it the highest-revenue-impact product launch in two years.
She also described Meta’s internal investment process as highly disciplined, with teams running experiments half-by-half and measuring returns over both one-year and four-year horizons.
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“The work that we have done has turned out to be more additive than we expected. You make the ads perform better. That drives costs down for advertisers. That drives their budgets on us up,” Li said.
She also acknowledged that Meta has been playing catch-up on data-center capacity, noting that much of what the company is building now won’t come online until 2027 or later.
Still, she framed the spending as investing from a position of strength and not desperation.
Meta spent much of 2025 overhauling its artificial intelligence division after its Llama 4 family of models failed to generate the developer excitement the company had hoped for.
As part of that revamp, Meta invested $14.3 billion into Scale AI and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead its new Meta Superintelligence Labs unit, CNBC reported.
What’s next for META stock
Meta’s stock is down roughly 32% from all-time highs, trailing most of its megacap peers. But the forward estimates tell a different story.
- Revenue is projected to climb from $200.97 billion in 2025 to $448.05 billion by 2030.
- EBITDA margins are expected to expand from 56.5% in 2026 to 67.2% by 2030.
- EPS on a GAAP basis is forecast to rise from $29.60 in 2026 to $57.61 by 2030.
Out of the 45 analysts covering META stock, 40 recommend “buy,” and five recommend “hold.” The average META stock price target is $864, 61% above the current price targets.
For dividend stock investors, the combination of a rising payout, improving margins, and a management team with real skin in the game makes Meta worth a close look, even if the $9 trillion target feels like science fiction right now.
Related: This megacap AI stock pays over $12 billion in annual dividends