Meta Platforms Stock Surges: Here’s Why It Crushed the Market Today

Meta's stock just left the broader market in the dust—and the timing couldn't be more ironic.

While traditional finance scrambles, Zuckerberg's bet on the metaverse and AI is paying off big time. No old-school bank can move this fast.

Remember when Wall Street laughed at the Meta pivot? They aren't laughing now.

Another day, another reminder that legacy finance is playing checkers while tech plays chess.

Favorable ruling

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google, Alphabet's Core business, need not break itself up with the sale of its Chrome web browser. Although the ruling mandates that the company share some of its data with certain peers, among other minor punitive measures, it falls well short of the business split the government was seeking in the antitrust suit.

Image source: Getty Images.

That came as a relief not only to Alphabet and its many shareholders, but to other tech giants that have also felt the hot gaze of federal regulators. Meta, the owner of foundational social media site Facebook, photo-sharing incumbent Instagram, and popular messaging service WhatsApp, felt to many as if it presented a juicy target.

While there's no guarantee that regulators will abruptly halt their scrutiny and pursuit of Big Tech, the Alphabet ruling makes this prospect significantly more unlikely. It's no wonder investors continued to breath a large, collective, sigh of relief on this latest development.

A side play on AI

Meanwhile, one of the more closely followed tech industry researchers named Meta a top pick to take advantage of a sweeping trend.

Thursday morning, Wedbush Securities released a new analysis, broken down into categories, on what it feels are the No. 1 stocks that will benefit from the feverish adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) functionalities. Meta was named as the "Consumer AI name set to dominate the landscape."