Meta shares rose 11.3% today. That is the stock's largest daily gain this year - bigger than the 10.4% of January 29 - and, according to reports, its strongest day since April 2025.
It did not happen in a vacuum: since the eve of the launch of Muse, the company's personal AI agent, two weeks ago, the stock has risen about 21%. This piece breaks down what Muse does, what happened along the way, and why today.
(I wrote about the launch itself, and Meta's decision to separate Muse from its advertising systems, here.)
There may be errors or inaccuracies. Found something that looks wrong? Write to me and I'll fix it.
In short:
- Muse is not a chatbot - it is an agent. It carries out tasks on the user's behalf: sending emails, booking travel, filling forms and making purchases.
- Early adoption is strong: according to Sensor Tower, number one in Apple's US App Store within ten days.
- Three things converged today: a tech rally, a Wells Fargo price-target increase, and anticipation of the Connect conference on Wednesday.
- What has not been proven: revenue, and sustained use.
The stock, in numbers
| Price | Note | |
|---|---|---|
| September 8 (eve of launch) | $613.48 | Close |
| September 9 (day after launch) | $653.69 | +6.55% |
| September 18 (Friday) | $665.75 | Close |
| September 21 | $741.25 | +11.34% |
| Change since the eve of launch | +20.8% |
(Closing prices, from Yahoo Finance trading data.)
And despite the gain, the stock is not at a record. Its 52-week high is $785.73 - about 6% above today's close.
What Muse is
Meta launched Muse on September 8, and describes it in its official announcement as "the world's first personal AI agent built for everyone".
The difference between an agent and a chatbot is what matters here. A chatbot answers questions. An agent takes actions. According to Meta, Muse can:
- Send emails, book travel and fill out forms
- Make purchases - through Stripe Link, with a one-time card generated for each purchase
- Keep working after the user closes the app, and ask for approval before sensitive actions
- Remember preferences and suggest ideas on its own initiative
- Negotiate on the user's behalf
It runs on Muse Spark, which Meta describes as its "most capable model to date", built for agentic work.
Availability: US only, on iPhone, Android, the web and inside WhatsApp. There is a free tier with a usage allowance, and two subscriptions: $20 and $100 a month. According to TechCrunch, even the free tier requires entering a payment card.
Adoption: what the numbers say
According to Sensor Tower, as reported by Yahoo:
- Muse reached number one on Apple's US free app chart on September 18 - day ten after launch
- More than 730,000 US downloads in the first ten days - about 73,000 a day on average
- It overtook ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Claude and Meta's own Instagram
For comparison: ChatGPT recorded about 697,000 US downloads in its first eight days in 2023 - about 87,000 a day on average.
In other words, Muse reached number one with a slower download pace than ChatGPT had at the time. That does not contradict its success - competition for the top spot has changed since - but it is a reminder that a store ranking is not a measure of size.
And there is a weak spot: according to the same report, on Android Muse ranks only 338th in Google Play's productivity category. So the success, at least for now, is concentrated on the iPhone.
Why today
Muse launched two weeks ago, and the market already reacted on September 9. So what changed today? According to reports, three things converged:
1. A rally across tech. The Nasdaq rose 2.26% today to a record close, led by chip stocks. And one explanation offered for the gains in Intel, AMD and Arm was Muse itself - the argument being that agents like it rely more on general-purpose processors. So Muse moved more than Meta today. (I covered the trading day in a separate piece.)
2. A price-target increase. According to reports, Wells Fargo raised its price target on the stock to $796 from $640 ahead of Connect, and identified Muse as the key metric to watch at the conference.
3. The conference itself. Connect opens on Wednesday, September 23, with a keynote by Mark Zuckerberg at Meta's California campus. Meta has teased new smart glasses, and its launch announcement said Muse is "coming soon" to its AI glasses as well.
And what did not move the stock: over the weekend Facebook and Instagram suffered an outage - according to Downdetector, more than 17,000 reports for Facebook and more than 5,000 for Instagram. The market ignored it.
Why the market is excited
To understand the reaction, remember what has worried Meta investors. The company spends tens of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure, and the recurring question was what it gets in return. According to analyses published after the launch, Muse is seen as the first sign that the investment can produce a consumer product people actually use.
There is also a change in the business model. Meta makes almost all of its money from advertising. Muse sells subscriptions - $20 and $100 a month. If that catches on, it is a new revenue source that does not depend on advertisers' marketing budgets.
What has not been proven
Three open questions:
- Sustained use. A download is not usage. The real test is how many users are still there after a month, and that figure does not exist yet.
- Revenue. Meta has not disclosed how many users moved to a paid plan. Until it shows up in the reports, it is an estimate.
- Trust. An agent that shops for you needs access to your email, calendar and payment methods. According to a survey cited by Yahoo, only 8% of consumers would trust Meta with their passwords - versus 30% for Google and 23% for Apple.
Meta is aware of the trust problem, and has built a technical answer around it. According to the official announcement, Muse runs in a separate virtual machine (Muse Secure VM), a separate agent called Sentinel approves every action that goes out to the internet, and the agent itself cannot see passwords or payment methods. Meta also commits that conversations are not passed to its advertising systems.
And the history Meta has to overcome is familiar. TechCrunch's launch coverage recalled the company's privacy settlements with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) - including a $5 billion penalty in 2019.
הזווית שלי
דעה אישית של אילן אברמוב - לא ייעוץ ולא המלצה
What I take from today is that the market is repricing Meta - from an advertiser spending a fortune on AI, to a company that may have found a use for it.
That is a significant change in the story. But it is worth separating the story from the evidence. Right now there is a number-one ranking in one store, in one country, after ten days. There is no sustained-usage data, no subscription data, and no revenue.
The figure that interests me most is actually Android. Number one on the iPhone and 338th in its category on Google Play - that gap is too large to ignore. It may have a simple technical explanation, and it may say something about who is downloading the app.
And the conference is two days away. When a stock rises 21% ahead of an event, the bar the event has to clear rises with it.
(To be clear: this is my personal opinion only, and nothing here is a recommendation to take any action.)
Ilan Abramov, the author, or anyone on his behalf may hold some of the securities or funds mentioned in this article.
