Meta’s latest AI ad, but the soundtrack is “Earth is about to be destroyed”

Meta launched its 45-second AI brand ad, “The Future Is for Everyone,” on July 23. Zuckerberg personally unveiled it. The visuals shifted from black-and-white AI panic headlines to colorful scenes of embracing and dancing, with voiceover saying, “The future is for everyone.” The music, however, was David Bowie’s 1972 track “Five Years”—a song about people learning that Earth will be destroyed by a massive extinction event in five years. A Meta spokesperson responded that David Bowie himself considered it an optimistic song.
（Background: Bloomberg: Meta is secretly building a cloud business, selling surplus AI compute to challenge the three major giants）
（Additional context: Zuckerberg was exposed for using AI token quantities at the back of the pack at Meta, and also asked employees to talk with his AI alter ego）

Table of contents

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• The song is about a news anchor crying as they announce the world will be destroyed
• Meta says David Bowie himself thought the song was optimistic
• $145B buys an optimistic narrative

Key takeaways

• Meta’s 45-second AI ad used David Bowie’s “Five Years” as the background music, singing about Earth’s destruction
• A Pew Research survey shows only 16% of Americans are optimistic about AI’s impact over the next 20 years, while 40% think it will be negative
• Meta’s 2026 capital expenditure guidance has been raised to $125 billion to $145 billion

Mark Zuckerberg personally released Meta’s latest AI brand ad, “The Future Is for Everyone,” on July 23. The creative team’s visuals were warm and heartfelt, but U.S. netizens quickly noticed that the background music was David Bowie’s 1972 song “Five Years,” a track themed around humanity learning that Earth will be destroyed in five years.

The opening is black-and-white: a single eye, with AI panic headlines flashing across the pupil. The voiceover says, “Some people want you to believe AI will make us less connected—will leave us behind. We totally disagree.” The visuals then shift to color: a couple dances on a rooftop pointing at the rainbow, teens swim in a lake, friends embrace—all framed like an Instagram post.

The closing voiceover says: “Call us optimists, call us dreamers—whatever you want. But we’re betting on people, and we like those odds. The future is for everyone.”

The song is about a news anchor crying as they announce the world will be destroyed

“Five Years” was recorded in November 1971 at London’s Trident Studios, released on June 16, 1972 as the opening track of the album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” with Earth set to have only five years to live after natural resources run out. In 1973, David Bowie was very direct with what he told Rolling Stone: “It’s already been announced: the world will be destroyed because of shortages of natural resources.”

The specific segment clipped into the ad happens to be the part of the song that repeatedly says “people,” so without context it really does look like it’s about human connection. But the lines immediately before it are about a news anchor crying that Earth is really going to die—there’s only five years left to cry. The editors picked those parts so precisely that it makes you wonder whether it was deliberate.

Meta says David Bowie himself thought the song was optimistic

In response to the mockery, a Meta spokesperson told external media that David Bowie believed “Five Years” was a song about being “optimistic about the future.” David Bowie’s estate management has not publicly responded yet. However, in January 2022, the estate management sold his publishing catalog for more than $250 million to Warner Chappell Music, covering 26 studio albums released during his lifetime, including “Ziggy Stardust.” The licensing may not have been decided by family members.

Rachel Karten, who writes a community newsletter, posted on X: “meta’s AI optimistic ad is set to David Bowie’s ‘Five Years,’ a doomsday disaster song about Earth being destroyed in five years.” Technology commentator Louis Anslow asked: “Is this a smart way to get opponents of AI to help spread the ad?”

$145B buys an optimistic narrative

Meta’s marketing chief Denise Moreno explained the motivation for filming: “Amid all this noise, it’s easy to feel like the future is headed toward fewer connections and less autonomy. We take a different stance—we believe AI will empower people to do more of what they love.”

A Pew Research Center survey also shows that only 16% of Americans believe AI will have a positive impact on society in the next 20 years, while 40% believe it will be negative.

Behind the ad is a massive investment. Meta has raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance from $115 billion to $135 billion to $125 billion to $145 billion. Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said the increase comes from “increased investments to support Meta Superintelligence Labs and the core business.” For comparison, full-year 2024 was $72.2 billion.

The timing is also awkward. The Instagram image-generation feature Muse Image, which launched on July 7, lets users reference other people’s publicly posted photos to generate images, and it is enabled by default. After SAG-AFTRA and multiple actors protested that it could produce involuntary digital alter egos, Meta removed the feature within days, admitting it “didn’t catch the point.”

On July 9, Anthropic’s brand film was also mocked after it included a burning house, surveillance footage, and a cemetery—prompting Sam Altman on X to joke, “I thought this was satire, I kept looking for whether the account spelled c1audeai.”

The issue of AI keeps stimulating people’s nerves, and Meta seems to have made plenty of missteps recently.

FAQ

Why was Meta’s AI ad mocked?

Meta’s 45-second ad “The Future Is for Everyone,” launched on July 23, is designed to show AI bringing people closer. But it used David Bowie’s 1972 song “Five Years,” which is about humanity falling into panic after learning that Earth will be destroyed in five years.

What is David Bowie’s “Five Years” about?

“Five Years” is the opening track of the 1972 album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” The premise is that Earth has only five years left after natural resources run out, and the lyrics begin with a news anchor crying as they announce the news.