As the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Meta, Susan Li plays a pivotal role in shaping the financial strategy of one of the world’s most influential technology companies. She took the job in November 2022, and at 36 she was the youngest CFO of a Fortune 100 company. She has remained in the role since.
Li’s path to the job was unusual. She joined Facebook in 2008 as a 22-year-old analyst and spent the next 14 years working her way up through the company’s finance organization before getting the top job. Before Facebook, she worked as an analyst at Morgan Stanley. She did not come up through investment banking leadership roles or arrive as an outside hire, the usual route to a Big Tech CFO seat.
What the Embedded Interview Covers
The video above is “A Cheeky Pint with Meta CFO Susan Li,” an interview with Stripe co-founder John Collison. In it, Li discusses how she went from being hired at Facebook at 22 to running finance at one of the world’s largest companies. The conversation covers her approach to capital allocation, how she manages investors, the blunt feedback Meta got from shareholders in 2022 that pushed the company to slow spending and run an “efficiency year,” how she thinks about forecasting, and how Meta decides where to direct computing power and capital spending as AI investment ramps up.
How She Describes the Job
Li has described the CFO as the person in the room who is always in a position to challenge other leaders. Her own standard, as she has put it, is that the value she creates for the company and its shareholders should exceed the value she costs, and she intends to show up every day proving she is the right person for the job.
The Year of Efficiency: Her Trial by Fire
Li took the CFO job in November 2022, about as tough an entry point as a finance chief gets. Meta’s stock had cratered, investors were furious about runaway spending, and the company had just cut 11,000 jobs. Two months later, Zuckerberg declared 2023 the “year of efficiency,” and Li became its executor. In March 2023 she told investors at a Morgan Stanley conference that Meta was “deploying our resources toward the highest leverage opportunities” and making “tough decisions to wind down projects in some places.” Another 10,000 layoffs followed that month, nearly a quarter of the workforce gone across the two rounds. The episode is the best evidence for her job description: the CFO is the person in the room who says no. She spent 14 years learning exactly where Meta’s money went, which made her unusually credible when the moment came to decide where it should stop going. She is one of a small club of Big Tech finance chiefs promoted from inside, alongside Alphabet’s Anat Ashkenazi.
The Capex Tightrope: $70 Billion a Year of Judgment Calls
On Meta’s second-quarter 2025 earnings call, Li guided full-year capital expenditure to $66 to $72 billion, up roughly $30 billion year-over-year at the midpoint, and warned that 2026 would see another year of similarly large dollar growth as the company builds AI data centers. That is the number that matters most for Meta shareholders right now. Every data center, every GPU cluster, every dollar of the AI buildout has to clear her bar before it gets spent. Zuckerberg supplies the ambition; Li supplies the arithmetic. For investors, her capex guidance is the clearest signal of how fast Meta’s AI bet is running, and whether the returns are keeping up with the spending.
Why Investors Should Care
At a company spending tens of billions of dollars a year on AI infrastructure, the CFO’s judgment on capital allocation is the check on the CEO’s ambition. Li’s rise from inside the company matters here: she spent 14 years learning where Meta’s money actually goes before she got the job of deciding where it goes next.
As CFO, Li is responsible for overseeing Meta’s financial operations, including financial planning, risk management, and investor relations. Her leadership has been instrumental in driving Meta’s financial performance, and her expertise has helped the company navigate the complexities of the tech industry.
As one of the few women leading finance at a Big Tech company, Li is also a visible example in a field where women remain underrepresented in the top jobs. For individuals looking to learn more about the financial leadership behind Meta, Susan Li’s story is an example of an insider’s path to the top: join early, learn the business from the inside, and earn the job by understanding the numbers better than anyone else in the room.
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