Susan Li

Who they are

Susan Li is CFO at Meta — joined Facebook in 2008 as a financial analyst when it was still pre-IPO, and has run the company's finances through IPO, the metaverse pivot, and now a $125–$145 billion AI spending commitment.

Person

Susan joined Facebook in 2008 as a financial analyst when the company was still private — she's been there through IPO, the rebrand to Meta, and every major capital allocation decision since. She studied Economics (B.A.) and Mathematical and Computational Sciences (B.S.) at Stanford, graduating in 2005, then spent three years at Morgan Stanley across the convertible desk, technology equity capital markets, and investment banking, rotating through New York, Menlo Park, and Hong Kong. After Morgan Stanley she moved directly to Facebook, climbing from analyst to Vice President of Finance between 2016 and 2022 before being named CFO in November 2022 — one of Fortune's 40 Under 40 that year. The through-line is operator depth over breadth: she has never left Meta and has built her authority by knowing the company's financials from the ground up. She sits on the Arc Institute board and previously served on the Alaska Air Group board from 2018 to 2023. Her public voice comes through conference appearances — Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley's TMT Conference, the Glue Guys and Cheeky Pint podcasts — where she talks capital allocation, AI spending trade-offs, headcount versus GPU budgets, and what a fast-learning culture looks like inside a company at Meta's scale. Fortune ranked her No. 41 on its Most Powerful Women list in 2025.

Company

Meta's most pressing live dynamic is the scale of its AI spending commitment: after Q1 2026 earnings (revenue of $56.3 billion, up 33% year over year), the company raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to $125–$145 billion, nearly doubling its 2025 capex of $72 billion. To fund that bet, Meta cut approximately 8,000 employees and froze around 6,000 open roles in May 2026, reassigning roughly 7,000 staff into AI-focused teams. On the product side, the company launched its Muse Spark model family — including Muse Spark 1.1 and a 30-billion-parameter open-weight Muse Glimmer — alongside Meta Glasses (in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, starting at $299), a terminal coding agent called Muse Code, and subscription tiers for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. A $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus, closed in late 2025, was ordered unwound by Chinese regulators in April 2026 — an early test of the new Foreign Investment Security Review mechanism — removing that AI agent team from Meta's portfolio. Meta Connect is scheduled for September 23–24, 2026.

Market

Meta is the dominant social advertising platform globally, with 3.60 billion daily active users across its Family of Apps as of Q2 2026 and full-year 2025 revenue of $201 billion; it is projected to surpass Google in global digital ad revenue for the first time by end of 2026. Its main rivals span several fronts: TikTok and YouTube Shorts in short-form video, Alphabet and Amazon in digital advertising, Apple and Microsoft in hardware and AI, and OpenAI in foundation models. Regulatory pressure is intensifying on all sides — EU Digital Markets Act scrutiny, an ongoing FTC antitrust appeal, €1.2 billion in EU GDPR penalties, and China's blocking of the Manus deal — making compliance costs and geopolitical friction a permanent feature of Meta's competitive environment.

Network

Susan reports directly to Mark Zuckerberg and co-presents earnings calls with him, making that relationship the most operationally significant one in her network. She worked alongside David Wehner, the prior CFO, during the transition period. Her board memberships — Arc Institute and formerly Alaska Air Group — extend her network into biomedical research philanthropy and aviation.

Mark Zuckerberg· CEO, Meta
David Wehner· Former CFO, Meta
Alexandr Wang· Head of Superintelligence division, Meta (former Scale AI CEO)
Dina Powell McCormick· Vice Chair and President, Meta

How they likely show up

Multi-decade tenure at a single company (joined 2008, pre-IPO) → thinks in institutional time horizons, not short cycles; likely wary of moves that optimize for the quarter at the expense of structural position.
Rose from financial analyst to CFO entirely within Meta → authority is earned through depth of institutional knowledge, not credential-hopping; she will know the detail behind any number you cite.
Podcast appearances on Glue Guys and Cheeky Pint covering headcount-vs-GPU trade-offs → comfortable translating complex capital allocation decisions into plain language; engages with operational specificity, not abstraction.
Morgan Stanley background across convertible desk, ECM, and IB in three cities → trained to hold multiple financial frameworks simultaneously; expects precision on structure and terms.
Currently stewarding a $125–$145 billion capex commitment alongside an 8,000-person reduction → operating under intense scrutiny on ROI timelines; unlikely to be patient with vague value propositions.
Board seat at Arc Institute (biomedical research) alongside a corporate CFO role → signals genuine interest in long-horizon, mission-driven institutions, not just optimizing for near-term returns.

Conversation tips

→ Come in with a specific number or trade-off — she has discussed headcount-versus-GPU allocation publicly, so frame any resource conversation in those terms rather than generic 'efficiency' language.
→ Reference the capex scale she is managing ($125–$145 billion in 2026) if discussing AI infrastructure — she will engage more readily if you demonstrate you understand the magnitude of the commitment and its free-cash-flow implications.
→ Ask about the fast-learning culture she described on the Glue Guys podcast — it's a topic she's chosen to speak about publicly and likely reflects something she has strong operational views on.
→ Don't conflate her finance role with a passive function — she co-presents earnings with Zuckerberg and is a named strategic partner to the CEO; she thinks of herself as a business operator who controls the numbers, not a reporter of them.
→ If the conversation touches on board governance or long-term bets, the Arc Institute seat is an honest bridge — she has chosen to spend governance time on a non-commercial, research-oriented institution.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on the headcount-versus-GPU trade-off she discussed on the Cheeky Pint podcast — she put a public stake in the ground on how Meta thinks about allocating between people and compute, and it's a live tension given the 8,000-person reduction announced in May 2026.
Reference the Manus acquisition unwind — Meta closed a $2 billion deal in late 2025 and was ordered to reverse it by Chinese regulators in April 2026; it's the most operationally disruptive geopolitical event in her recent tenure and a natural entry into a conversation about cross-border AI strategy and deal risk.
Lead with the $125–$145 billion 2026 capex commitment and the ROI timeline question — she appeared at the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference in March 2025 and Bloomberg in July 2023 specifically to address investor skepticism about AI spending returns; it's the defining pressure she is managing right now.

Discovery questions

When you're deciding between deploying capital into GPUs versus headcount in AI teams, what does the internal decision framework actually look like at Meta's scale?
After the Manus deal was ordered unwound by Chinese regulators, how has that changed how Meta thinks about cross-border AI acquisitions — are you moving toward more organic development and domestic partnerships?
You've talked publicly about building a fast-learning culture — how do you maintain that inside a finance function that's simultaneously managing $125–$145 billion in capital expenditures and explaining ROI timelines to public markets?

Avoid

Don't open with generic praise about Meta's ad revenue growth — she fields that on every earnings call; she engages with the hard trade-offs (capex versus free cash flow, headcount versus GPUs, regulatory friction versus product velocity), not with the headline numbers.

Make it yours