April 24 should have been a red-letter day for investors in social media company Meta. After a rapid path through Congress, President Joe Biden signed a new law requiring Chinese internet company ByteDance to sell the US end of its TikTok service or see it banned from the country’s mobile app stores. The wildly popular viral video platform, which once seemed an existential threat to Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, looked to have been defanged.

By the end of the day, however, that was long forgotten. An unpleasant shock from Meta’s latest earnings report initially wiped US$200 billion (S$272 billion) from its stock market value. With its ambitions around artificial intelligence growing, the company warned of an unexpected leap in costs and capital investment, with no promise of exactly when the increased spending would pay off.