Great time to buy Meta as Mark Zuckerberg has an 'Elon Musk-style' moment - Cleo Capital
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Cleo Capital analyst Sarah Kunst said Tuesday that "this is a great time to buy Meta (NASDAQ:META)" after shares of the Facebook parent company have dropped more than 50% in 2022.
Speaking to CNBC, the managing director at Cleo Capital added that META CEO Mark Zuckerberg has lately taken a page from Tesla (TSLA) boss Elon Musk, calling out employees to work harder and looking for places to "trim the fat."
"[Meta is] kind of having this work hard or leave, Elon Musk-style gauntlet-thrown moment, with Mark Zuckerberg saying 'hey, you know, a lot of you guys who work here, probably shouldn't even be here,'" Kunst said.
The analyst noted that cost-cutting at the social media giant "could work really really really well for the stock price." However, she acknowledged that this recent push toward expense control could also fail to drive shareholder value.
Even so, Kunst argued that the recent slide in the firm's stock price has made for a rare entry point.
"It's being seen as a value stock ... and that's pretty unprecedented from what we've seen in the last few years of these tech stocks," she said.
Looking longer-term, Kunst contended that buying META depends significantly on an investor's view of the company's bet on the metaverse. 
On one hand, the analyst said these "journeys" into activities beyond the firm's core Facebook business could create a diverse tech company, akin to Google parent Alphabet (GOOG)(GOOGL) or lead to an important source of additional revenue, like the AWS offerings at Amazon (AMZN).
However, she also indicated some skepticism from Wall Street about META's ability to extract value from its metaverse investments in the near term.
"I think you have to ask yourself: do you think all these other things are distractions from their core businesses," Kunst said.
"For a lot of people on the Street, it's a little bit hard to wrap your head around the idea that in a year from now that millions of us will be sitting strapped to headsets on our eyes, looking at the metaverse," she added.

For more on META's prospects in the near-term market, read a deep dive by Seeking Alpha contributor Stone Fox Capital, who says the stock is "priced for a financial hurricane."