Why a New Mexico Judge Ordered Meta to Pay $25 Billion, and Why the Stock Barely Moved

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, to pay a $25 billion civil penalty after a jury found that Facebook misled users about how their personal data was shared, a case that grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The first report of the order reached the MoveSurge news feed at 13:16:59 ET. Meta stock hardly reacted: after a second report at 13:22:16 ET, META rose 0.24% in one minute, from $706.41 to $708.09, and was up 0.10% ten minutes later.

The stock was already 1.75% above Tuesday's close of about $694.23 before the ruling. It drifted back to $694.49 by 15:18:59 ET, then rose 1.35% in the ten minutes after a Semafor report that Meta plans to issue nonvoting shares to help pay for its AI spending. At 16:00 ET META was at $697.77, up 0.51% on the day. Meta was due to report third-quarter results after the close the same day.

What the jury found

New Mexico sued Facebook in 2021, when Hector Balderas was attorney general. The case centered on what the company told users after Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm that obtained data from about 87 million Facebook profiles through a personality-quiz app. After a trial in the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, the jury found on September 25, 2026 that 26 of 29 statements by Meta and its leaders were misleading, Reuters reported. According to CBS News, the jury found that Facebook falsely told consumers they controlled how their information was shared and falsely said it did not share personal data with advertisers. The jury rejected the state's claims on three statements about content moderation.

How the judge reached $25 billion

New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act allows a penalty of up to $5,000 per violation. The jury counted more than 43 million violations, based on how many people saw each statement, so Judge Francis J. Mathew found that more than $219 billion was warranted before cutting the figure to $25 billion. That works out to less than $582 per violation. At a hearing on October 1, the state asked for $35 billion to $40 billion and Meta proposed $345 million to $3.45 billion. The money goes to New Mexico's education fund, according to Reuters and the Associated Press.

How large $25 billion is for Meta

The penalty equals about 28% of the cash and securities Meta held at the end of June and about 1.6 times its second-quarter profit. It is five times the $5 billion penalty Meta paid the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 over the same scandal. New Mexico has also won a separate child-safety case against Meta this year, in which a jury imposed $375 million in March and a judge ordered $567 million for an abatement fund on August 6.

Meta did not immediately respond to the $25 billion order, according to Reuters and the Associated Press. After the September verdict it said it disagreed and would keep defending itself against "efforts to distort our record," and the Associated Press reported that Meta plans to appeal.