Meta gives its boss new shares to stay put⁠.

Meta has struck a deal with Mark Zuckerberg to help him pay a possible California wealth tax aimed at billionaires¹. In return he commits to remain a resident of California, or wherever Meta keeps its base, for eight years¹. Meta calls it the Founder Alignment Agreement².

Californians vote early next month on Proposition 40, a one-off 5% tax on the roughly 250 billionaires who live in the state¹. Zuckerberg, worth $239bn (£180bn) according to Forbes, told Meta he was thinking of moving his main home elsewhere because of it¹. The BBC reports the tax would likely cost him around $10bn². He told the board a move would raise questions for the management of the company².

The mechanism is a stock split². Meta is creating a new class of non-voting shares, one for every existing share, so that Zuckerberg can sell some to meet a tax bill without weakening his control¹. He will receive more stock, more often, and may sell it every quarter, and the deal appears to hold even if the tax does not pass². A Meta disclosure described the talks as robust and, at several points, contentious².

Meta tied the deal to AI². It said keeping him in charge from California was critically important given the transformation in the tech industry and the global economy related to artificial intelligence². It plans to spend as much as $145bn on AI this year, and has posted negative cash flow for the first time since it listed 14 years ago². Its finance chief, Susan Li, said the split would also give Meta more ways to pay for future AI work².

Investors were not reassured². Meta's shares fell more than 7% on Thursday, wiping more than $100bn off its market value². Quarterly revenue rose 26% to $64.6bn, but profit fell 37% to $13bn after a $9.9bn charge linked to its child protection lawsuit, and its headcount is 15% lower than a year ago¹.

Watch the AI bill, not the boss

None of this reaches a British company directly. No British body has said anything about it, and a California ballot binds nobody here. The part worth your attention is underneath the pay deal. The company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is now spending more cash than it takes in to build AI, and its finance chief has just described the new shares as one more way to pay for it.

If your business leans on a big platform's AI tools, the price you pay is set by firms spending at this rate. Nobody has said how that bill will be met, and the shareholders who sold on Thursday were asking the same question. Keep a short list of which jobs in your business depend on one supplier's AI, and what you would do if its terms changed. Buy what works today, on terms you can walk away from.

Also today

• OpenAI reportedly close to a $30bn raise at $1.25tn

  OpenAI is reportedly close to raising up to $30bn at a $1.25tn valuation in a round led by Coatue and investors in the UAE, after filing confidential paperwork for a listing in June³.

• Chinese hackers used AI agents after the ConnectWise breach

  Microsoft says China state-aligned hackers stole credentials from ConnectWise's cloud backup service and used AI agents to break into about 2,250 organisations, at almost 3,000 sign-in attempts a minute⁴.

• Government plans an AI unit to spot wildfires faster

  Andy Burnham will announce a wildfire AI unit in the National Situation Centre at the government's first wildfire resilience summit, alongside £45m for fire crews to buy wildfire protective kit⁵.

• Anthropic hands its Agent Skills standard to an open foundation

  Anthropic is donating its Agent Skills standard to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, which it co-founded with Block and OpenAI and which already holds its Model Context Protocol⁶.