With one landmark courtroom victory this week against Meta Platforms Inc., New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is poised to bring in almost double the state’s annual revenue.

A $25 billion civil penalty ordered by a judge Wednesday would be among the largest payouts in US legal history if it stands. It dwarfs the state’s $14.8 billion projected general fund revenue for fiscal year 2028. The magnitude of the windfall wasn’t lost on the Ivy League-educated official when he explained at a press conference that, by law, the money must be spent on building schools.

“We may have in fact paid for the construction of schools for the next several hundred years,” Torrez said. “I don’t actually know because the amounts that we’re dealing with are so huge.”The eye-popping outcome of a case that stemmed from an almost decade-old privacy scandal is a stark example of how small-population states can have an outsized impact on Big Tech if they’re willing to risk going to trial.

“When they go to trial they roll the dice,” District Judge Francis Mathew said of New Mexico at a hearing earlier this year, a nod to the risks an AG takes when dedicating massive resources to a case he could lose at trial.

Torrez faced off against Meta in Santa Fe state court even after almost every other state and territory settled for far less.

It’s not the first time he’s taken his chances: He won almost $1 billion from Meta earlier this year after convincing a jury that the parent of Facebook and Instagram misled youths about the dangers of predators on its social media platforms while also harming children with addictive designs.

“The internet companies are bigger than most countries, in terms of their wealth,” said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. “Taking that on as an individual state is a quite expensive and risky proposition.”The Democrat first elected as New Mexico’s top legal official in 2022 has taken other bold moves in court, including suing the US Justice Department in August for allegedly “stonewalling” the state’s probe into the late Jeffrey Epstein.

On the same day New Mexico was awarded the equivalent of about a third of Meta’s projected fourth-quarter revenue, Torrez on Wednesday announced a new civil suit against Epstein’s former lawyer and accountant, accusing them of helping to facilitate, finance and conceal a sex trafficking operation, which allegedly included the abuse of girls and young women at the financier’s Zorro Ranch property near Santa Fe. The advisers have previously denied wrongdoing and a lawyer representing them called the suit “baseless.”

In the lead-up to the $25 billion penalty, a jury determined that Meta had violated the state’s consumer protection laws over 43 million times. The September verdict was based on dozens of widely viewed statements made by the company and its top executives about how it handled hate speech and user data, including data given to Cambridge Analytica that was used to target voters for Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 election.

Meta Chief Legal Officer CJ Mahoney said in a statement that “we are confident we will prevail on appeal.”

“This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” Mahoney said. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.”New Mexico went to trial alone after Meta in August agreed to pay almost half a billion dollars to other states and territories to release any future claims over Cambridge Analytica. The remaining holdouts are the District of Columbia, which has a pending suit, and Florida, which hasn’t sued. Both stand to get a boost from Torrez’s triumph.

Torrez brought in outside private law firms to help with preparing and bringing the case to trial, a common tactic for small and under-resourced states. One of New Mexico’s outside trial attorneys, Corban Rhodes of the law firm DiCello Levitt, said he’s observed that the state is “not afraid to take cases to trial.”“No matter how good a settlement is, one of the limitations is that you don’t get all the kinds of evidence out into the public record that you can with a trial,” Rhodes said.

Torrez, raised in Albuquerque, earned a bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University in 1999 and a master’s at London School of Economics before graduating from Stanford Law School in 2005.

Torrez, who is married and has two children, returned to New Mexico after his education. He told Stanford Magazine in 2023 that he decided to take a job earning $37,000 a year as an assistant district attorney in New Mexico’s Valencia County, the same county where his father practiced law.

Torrez went on to become a state and federal prosecutor known for handling violent crimes, firearms cases, white collar crimes, voter fraud and internet crimes against children. Former President Barack Obama appointed him as a White House fellow in 2009.

His 2026 reelection campaign reflects how his profile has shifted while in office. Torrez now puts “impact litigation,” consumer protection and challenges to Big Tech at the center of his record, as national corporate cases – particularly against Meta – have become a much bigger part of his political identity.

The massive Meta penalty on Wednesday is the latest result of Torrez choosing to go his own path rather than join forces with other states pursuing similar claims.

In late August, Meta announced that it had struck a record-setting settlement agreement with nearly every US state for a total of $18 billion. The deal resolved an ongoing trial in Oakland, California, that pit Meta against attorneys general who alleged that the company deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to encourage compulsive use among young users.

Torrez inherited the Meta case from his predecessor, Hector Balderas, who launched the litigation over the company’s handling of personal data. Balderas said New Mexico’s willingness to pursue major companies independently rather than join national settlements dated back more than a decade, including cases against opioid manufacturers.

“Our small state was not benefiting equitably in some of those national settlements,” Balderas said. He credited Torrez with continuing that approach, saying he had taken an “aggressive posture” while using litigation to push for broader changes in corporate conduct. “I am grateful to Raúl that he continued that fight.”