Meta is betting on a human-first AI future, but growing legal battles and declining public trust are putting Mark Zuckerberg’s vision to the test.
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“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want, but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds. The future is for everyone.”
That ad copy is from the voice-over of a July Meta Platforms META -3.38%.
spot that’s been part of a public-relations blitz to position Meta as the humanist AI company. The message was undercut by the ad’s inclusion of David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a brooding 1972 song about an impending apocalypse. But this week CEO Mark Zuckerberg left no ambiguity, publishing a 6,500-word manifesto—about 10 times the length of this newsletter—with a title that echoed the ad: “The Future is for Everyone.”
That seems to be Meta’s new tagline. In light of sinking public opinion and the company’s thousands of lawsuits from states, school districts, parents, and users, Meta’s public relations have been defensive. This push represents a return to offense, with a chance to distinguish Meta’s approach to AI from other labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX SPCX +9.65%.
“It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future.”
Zuckerberg frames what sort of future we build with AI as the central issue of our time. “We believe that delivering superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question,” he says. “This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before.”
The flood of words belies the situation on the ground in mid-2026. Americans, at least, have a love-hate affair with social media. A November Pew Research Center poll reported that 71% of U.S. adults used Facebook, and 51% used Instagram. Worldwide, 3.6 billion people use at least one Meta app every day.
But in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in July and August, 61% of respondents said they wanted more government oversight of social media, and two-thirds supported laws to keep children under 16 years old off the platforms. When it comes to Meta in particular, in the 2026 Axios Harris 100, an annual poll about corporate reputation, Meta placed 96th out of 100. It’s only above two other social media companies, Chinese ultracheap retailer Temu, and Spirit Airlines, a defunct air carrier. Regarding ethics, Meta came in last, and it was only ahead of TikTok in trust.
The steady drip of headlines in the teen social media trials isn’t helping. Last week, Meta lost a judgment in New Mexico state court that raised their liability in that relatively small jurisdiction to nearly $1 billion dollars. On Wednesday, jury selection began for a federal case with four states suing Meta over addictive product design, and false marketing that said its platforms were safe for teenagers. In July, Meta claimed that the states are asking for a total of $1.4 trillion in damages, in addition to design changes in the apps. This is part of a multidistrict litigation, where thousands of federal trials with social media defendants are coordinated in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ district courthouse in Oakland, Calif.
There is a separate such group of thousands of cases in California state court, mostly with individual plaintiffs. The steady drip of bad headlines from the courts will continue unless Meta decides to settle en masse.
Meanwhile, in the second quarter, Meta booked “$2.40 billion of charges related to legal proceedings,” according to its quarterly filing. That may be just the beginning.
Zuckerberg spent 6,500 words getting his utopian message out, but I can sum it up in two: Trust us. The evidence is that Meta has a long way to go to win back that trust.
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SHEIN’s Hong Kong IPO wiped a $4.4 billion obligation from its books, but the fast-fashion giant still faces a payout of up to $3.5 billion to early investors.
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Companies typically go public to raise money to supercharge growth. Fast-fashion giant Shein has another motivation.
The company’s initial public offering in Hong Kong this week is allowing it to avoid paying out billions to early investors.
If Shein hadn’t sold shares by the end of the year, the company would have been required to fork out nearly $4.4 billion in cash to holders of its convertible redeemable preferred shares. With the IPO, the $17.3 billion in preferred shares was converted to ordinary equity, and that obligation was wiped off the books.
But Shein was still on the hook for another payment. Holders of those preferred shares were entitled to a payout of billions more, in part because the company’s valuation has fallen from its peak. That payout came to nearly $3.5 billion in cash, according to regulatory filings.
The retailer on Monday priced its shares at 48.56 Hong Kong dollars each, equivalent to about $6.20 and near the middle of the range of HK$47.60 and HK$49.50 it provided last week.
The company pressed ahead with its IPO despite slowing growth and regulatory headwinds in the U.S. and European Union. Shein priced its IPO at a valuation of around $26 billion, roughly a quarter of the $98.2 billion valuation it achieved in a funding round in 2022.
Shein started selling its wares in the U.S. around 2012 and shot to popularity during the pandemic when more people shopped online. Its supply-chain prowess and vast range of styles at affordable prices made the brand a favorite among many U.S. consumers. It showed other retailers, including Amazon.com, that consumers were willing to wait more than a week for their online purchases to be delivered—if the price was right. But rivals soon emerged, such as Temu, which sells more products apart from apparel.
Shein’s business model of selling massive amounts of cheap goods lost some of its shine as more countries started imposing tariffs on small packages. The U.S. removed a trade exemption that allowed packages valued at or below $800 to enter the country duty-free, and the EU has introduced a €3 (about $3.50) customs duty on imports of low-value parcels.
Shein has worked toward its IPO for years, and the looming $4.4 billion obligation wasn’t the only reason it went public. But the threat of the big payout on Dec. 31 was certainly a part of its reason to press ahead, said Jianggan Li, founder and chief executive of Momentum Works, a research advisory firm based in Singapore.
“Complete the listing before then,” said Li, “and a very large liability comes off the balance sheet.”
While that liability will now be off its books with a successful IPO, Shein said it was saddled with another bill: the roughly $3.5 billion it owed its early investors upon going public.
That amount includes $1.3 billion that Shein had to pay several late-stage pre-IPO investors who had been guaranteed a cash payout at an 8% or 12% annual return, and up to $2.2 billion in compensation for the fall in the company’s valuation in the period after they made their investments. The $2.2 billion was a projection based on the lower end of the offer price range, or HK$47.60 per share, so the total bill will likely be smaller than $3.5 billion. The exact amount has yet to be disclosed by the company.
Notably, the amount it owes investors is more than the roughly $1.7 billion the company raised in the IPO. The company said it was paying the funds to its investors out of cash it has on hand.
The investors entitled to the payments include entities linked to HSG, formerly known as Sequoia China, Boyu Capital, Tiger Global, General Atlantic, Thrive Capital and others.
“What the IPO really does here is resolve the capital-structure overhang,” Li said. “It gives investors liquidity, terminates those preferred-share rights and cleans up obligations created when Shein raised money at much higher valuations.”
Shein could have kicked the can down the road by renegotiating terms with its investors, he said: “Shein is not taking the cheapest way out of its old financing obligations. It is taking the cleaner way out.”
