So how are those New Year’s resolutions working out for you?
The year is not a week old, but we thought we’d check in to see about your plans to lose weight, spend time more with your family, quit smoking, learn to play trombone and take up skydiving.
Related: Meta’s new vision might transform AI and social media
Roughly 88% of people who set resolutions fail before the end of January, according to a study by the Baylor College of Medicine, and the second Friday of the month has been dubbed “Quitter’s Day.”
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Changing careers is one of the more popular New Year’s resolutions, and one of the toughest to keep, but Nick Clegg, Meta Platforms’ (META) president of global affairs, seems to have nailed that one.
“As a new year begins, I have come to the view that this is the right time for me to move on from my role as President, Global Affairs at Meta,” Clegg said in a Jan. 2 post on X. “It truly has been an adventure of a lifetime!”
He will be succeeded by Joel Kaplan, the company’s current vice president of global public policy, who joined Facebook in 2011.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Meta kicks in for Trump inauguration
Kaplan served eight years in the administration of Republican President George W. Bush, worked as a lobbyist and is reportedly known for handling the company’s relations with Republicans.
Clegg, who had worked for the Facebook parent for nearly seven years, said he was “simply thrilled” that Kaplan was taking over the global affairs position, adding that “he is quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time!”
Related: Analysts reboot Meta stock price targets for 2025
The move comes just ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Trump, who has called Facebook “the enemy of the people,” wrote in his book “Save America” that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg plotted against him during the 2020 election. Trump said the Facebook founder would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he did it again.
Facebook and Meta’s Instagram suspended the former president’s accounts for two years in 2021 following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
Last month, Meta said it would be donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, joining OpenAI, Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, who is personally writing a $1 million check for the event.
And of course Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk was a megadonor to Trump’s presidential bid.
Popular resolution: Cutting time on social media
Cutting time on social media is an increasingly popular New Year resolution, which Meta and companies in the sector probably won’t like to hear.
Meta recently deleted Instagram accounts labeled as “AI managed by Meta” following an online backlash.
Connor Hayes, Meta’s vice president of product for generative AI, had told the Financial Times that “we expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do.”
However, Meta spokesperson Liz Sweeney told Inc. that the company had taken down the profiles to fix a bug that had disabled users from blocking the accounts,
She said that there had been confusion regarding Hayes’ interview, noting that “the recent Financial Times article was about our vision for AI characters existing on our platforms over time, not announcing any new product.”
Sweeney said “the accounts referenced are from a test we launched at Connect in 2023.”
“These were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we did with AI characters,” she said.
Meta, which is scheduled to report earnings next month, has seen its shares climb nearly 77% from a year ago.
During the company’s last earnings call in October Zuckerberg told analysts that “parts of our long-term vision around AI and the future of computing are coming into sharper focus.”
Analyst sees challenging Q1 for Meta
“Meta AI now has more than 500 million monthly actives,” he said. “Improvements to our AI-driven feed and video recommendations have led to an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6% increase on Instagram this year alone.”
TheStreet Pro’s Bob Lang said on Jan. 2 that Meta was one of the Magnificent 7 stocks that had fallen out of favor.
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“It doesn’t take much to change these behemoths from bullish to bearish,” the veteran options trader said. “We might say the stock is due for a bounce, but where it comes from is anyone’s guess. The stock is in a no-man’s land.”
Investment firms have been revising their positions on Meta coming into the new year.
Jefferies raised the investment firm’s price target on Meta Platforms to $715 from $675 on Jan. 6 and affirmed a buy rating on the shares, according to The Fly.
A combination of second half weighted share performance in 2024 and a seasonally challenging first quarter leads the firm to believe a more cautious, selective approach to software going into 2025 is justified, Jefferies said.
However, the firm adds that it expects the space to accelerate in the second half of 2025 on potentially more contributions from AI and as “positive revisions on conservative guidance come through.”
Wedbush analysts boosted its price target on Meta Platforms to $680 from $640 while maintaining an outperform rating on the shares.
While the investment firm expects a positive return for consumer internet again this year, 2025 will be a year of winners and losers .
Wedbush said investors would debate topics spanning capital-spending requirements and AI investments, slowing margin gains, disruption from autonomous vehicles, AI monetization across enterprises and consumer products, and the impact of foreign-exchange headwinds.
Wolfe Research raised its price target on Meta Platforms to $730 from $670 on Jan. 3 while reiterating an outperform rating on the shares as part of a 2025 outlook for the internet group.
The investment firm said that 2025 could be another positive year for internet, but maybe not as much outperformance as 2023 and 2024 given current multiples.
Wolfe the prospect of higher estimates driven by product catalysts, a “relatively healthy” macro backdrop, successful capital allocation, and “pockets of rerating potential.”
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