Meta stuns Street with lower costs, big buyback, upbeat sales

Meta Platforms Inc’s stricter cost controls this year and a new $40 billion share buyback sent shares soaring on Wednesday, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg called 2023 the “Year of Efficiency.”

The parent of Instagram and Facebook, which has fallen on hard times amid a broad post-pandemic slump in digital ads, is focused on improving its content recommendations powered by artificial intelligence and its ad targeting systems to keep users clicking.