Meta Stocks continued their extended rally on Friday, rising 2.4% to close at a record level after a federal appeals court upheld a law requiring China’s ByteDance to sell TikTok or face an effective U.S. ban.

The Facebook parent company is up 77% this year after nearly tripling in 2023, pushing Meta’s market cap to nearly $1.6 trillion.

In addition to meta, Amazon It also closed at an all-time high on Friday and is up 49% this year. Apple slipped slightly from its peak on Thursday. Strong gains in tech megacaps this year helped push the Nasdaq to a record. The index rose 0.8% on Friday and has gained 32% in 2024.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined President-elect Donald Trump for dinner last week at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where he showed off the company’s camera-equipped Ray-Ban specs, according to Fox News reported for the first time. Zuckerberg, who has been frequently verbally attacked by the new president, appears to be seeking an active role in working with the Trump administration.

TikTok is one of Meta’s biggest competitors and has gained popularity in recent years, especially among younger target groups, and now has around 170 million users in the USA. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that would require ByteDance to divest the app, forcing companies like Apple and Google and internet hosting providers to stop supporting it.

The unanimous ruling was rejected Friday by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, DC TikTok’s argument that the law is unconstitutional and violates its users’ First Amendment rights. TikTok said later on Friday that it would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court’s decision.

“The Supreme Court has a proven historical track record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect it will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” a TikTok spokesperson said in an email.

Meta’s rally began in late 2022 and picked up steam early last year after Zuckerberg declared 2023 the “Year of Efficiency.” The company cut about 21,000 jobs and rebuilt its advertising systems using new advances in artificial intelligence.

In its third-quarter earnings release, Meta reported a 19% year-over-year increase in revenue while warning of a significant acceleration in its infrastructure spending in 2025. The company reported 3.29 billion “daily active people” for the third quarter, an increase of just 5 % year-on-year.

Zuckerberg has highlighted Meta’s efforts to develop new AI products and services, which will require spending billions of dollars Nvidia Graphics processors and the energy to run them. And Meta has built data centers to support the technology infrastructure needed for its AI strategy.

Zuckerberg posted on the Threads app on Friday that Meta AI “now has nearly 600 million monthly actives” and will soon release version 3.3 of its large open-source language model Llama. Zuckerberg didn’t say how Meta counts a “monthly active” user for its AI technology.

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