Should You Buy Meta Platforms Before Its Stock Split?

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) has been an up-and-down stock in 2026, and its latest announcement may just add more vigor to its oscillations: The company will enact a 2-for-1 stock split in January. However, this won't be your standard stock split, and it comes with nuances investors need to be aware of.

So, should you buy Meta's stock before the event arrives? After all, stocks often run up significantly when the market is waiting for them to split.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

Meta's new Class C shares won't have voting rights

Meta's stock split isn't exactly standard. Instead of splitting its shares 2-for-1 outright, it's creating a new class of shares. For each pre-split Class A share an investor owns, they will be given one Class A share and one new Class C share. The A shares will have voting rights. The C shares won't. This may seem like an odd way to split the stock, but it's easy to see what Meta is trying to do. Meta has told investors that in the future, it will use C shares for employee compensation, acquisitions, and raising cash.

So, with each new C share issued, the shareholder base grows, but the new stock structure locks in majority voting power for CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. He already holds more than half the voting power thanks to the super-voting Class B shares that he owns 99.7% of -- those have 10 votes apiece. Now, he can further dilute his 13% financial stake in Meta by issuing more shares without diluting his control of it. He thus can continue to steer the company in any direction he wants without being concerned that the other shareholders might replace him, barring any malpractice.

Bearing in mind that Meta's stock split also locks the company into Zuckerberg's vision for the foreseeable future, the question of whether you should buy it now hinges on whether you trust his long-term vision. If you do, then this move makes a ton of sense. If you don't, now may be the time for you to get Meta's stock out of your portfolio.

However, Zuckerberg's current direction for the company has started to pay off, as its recently launched agentic AI app, Meta Muse, is seeing huge early adoption and could prove to be the very platform the company needs to start making some direct profits from all of its AI spending. Overall, Meta's business is still doing great, with revenue rising 26% year over year. So, Meta is still doing great as a company.

But because it's not yet clear what its path to monetizing AI will look like, the market is still viewing the stock with skepticism. This is reflected in its 1-year forward price-to-earnings ratio of 18.

META PE Ratio (Forward 1y) data by YCharts.

That's not a particularly high valuation for the company, especially considering the reaction the market has had since Meta reported its Q3 results. If you want to buy, now could be a prime opportunity because it's on sale. However, if you're not sure about Zuckerberg, it's time to move on, because he's about to lock in his majority voting power permanently.

Keithen Drury has positions in Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.