Meta Just Became the Best Stock in the Magnificent 7 - Here's the Data That Proves It

If you’re looking for the best Magnificent 7 stock to buy right now for the next five to ten years, forget the hype trains and the over‑valued names. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) has not-so-quietly become the go-to stock for millions of investors. There’s a simple thesis as to why that’s the case for so many investors – roughly half the world’s population is on one of the company’s core social media platforms each and every day. 

Accordingly, while Wall Street spends its time overlooking this story while chasing the next chip or cloud play, I think Meta’s sheer earnings power (now driven by AI) and its owner‑operator discipline make this stock look not just cheap, but among the best stocks in the market to own right now.

Let’s start with the numbers, because in terms of its fundamentals, Meta is already outworking most of the Magnificent Seven.

In the latest quarters, revenue growth has been in the mid‑to‑high‑teens. That’s a very impressive growth rate for a company of this size, no doubt. But perhaps the key takeaway I think investors should be focusing on is that this growth has been driven almost entirely by the Family of Apps (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads). This growth has also not been contained to the top line. In terms of earnings growth, Meta has provided an even more impressive rate of growth, with double-digit upside in EPS expected for years to come.

Now, the one thing that may derail this thesis, at least from a cash flow perspective, is the company’s heavy investments made in its AI capabilities. Via its Llama LLM and other AI integrations into its core family of apps, Meta is hoping to improve the user experience, while also accelerating its monetization efforts. If things work out according to plan, these investments could certainly pay off big time. We’ll just have to see on this front – time will tell.

That said, I will point out that after years of focusing on efficiency, Meta does look like a responsible allocator of investor capital. If these trends continue, this is a stock I think investors will kick themselves for not owning a decade from now. 

Speaking of those AI investments.

Where Meta really shines is in how it’s tying AI directly to cash flow, not to slides and roadmaps. The company is on track to spend roughly $115 billion to $135 billion dollars on capital expenditures in 2026. As most investors would expect, the vast majority of that going into AI compute infrastructure. That’s not a vague “cloud” number. Rather, it’s a laser‑focused bet on building the world’s largest and most efficient AI training environment inside its own stack.

On top of that hardware backbone, Meta is layering its Llama‑series models (including the upcoming Llama 4 and the rumored “Behemoth”‑class frontier model) alongside proprietary closed LLMs like Avocado, designed for direct commercial use. What investors often miss is that Meta isn’t just selling APIs. This is a company that’s focusing on baking AI into its entire business model, from ad targeting to content ranking, recommendation engines, and even future autonomous agents that can execute multi‑step tasks for advertisers and consumers.

From a monetization angle, AI is already working. AI‑driven recommendation engines and ad‑ranking tools have lifted user engagement, average price per ad, and conversion rates. Thus, Meta has found a way to effectively narrow the gap with Google in digital advertising. Over time, that means Meta captures more of every advertising dollar in the ecosystem, not less, even as the broader economy cycles.

You can’t talk about Meta’s AI story without talking about the underlying business, because that’s the moat. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads reach billions of people every day, giving Meta one of the richest real‑time behavioral data sets on the planet. That data isn’t just a privacy‑regulatory minefield. It’s the fuel that makes Meta’s AI models more accurate, more relevant, and more sticky than models trained on generic internet scrapes.

And the monetization options are expanding. Beyond display ads, Meta is slowly cracking the code on WhatsApp and Messenger commerce, short‑form video, influencer‑driven brand deals, and even VR/AR‑enabled experiences over the long haul. Each of these vectors leans on AI to match offers to users, personalize content, and optimize spend, creating a self‑reinforcing flywheel. That is, greater user engagement leads to more data (which enhances the company’s AI ambitions) and ultimately flows through to higher revenue.

In other words, I think it’s hard for investors to foresee a future in which Meta won’t continue growing from here.