Interesting article, but there does appear to be a pretty substantial error in the foundation you lay for argument.

It appears that in the first part of the article, you are saying that price to distributable cash flow doesn’t adjust for capex? Likewise, in the paragraph that immediately follows, you state “Imagine ignoring those billions in growth capital spending and still giving Meta credit for the free cash flow growth associate with that spending.”

Here’s the problem. Both distributable cash flow and FCF are post-capex cash flow. As such, both measures already account for capex, with the cash flow that they provide truly being a measure of that which can be delivered to investors.

The only way that a DCF model might use either of these metrics, yet not give credit for capex facilitated growth is if the growth rate were set to 0%. However, that isn’t an error of distributable cash flow or FCF, that is an error on the part of the analyst in setting the growth rate.