Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder, chairman, CEO, Meta Platforms Credit: Meta Meta’s shares closed up 11.43% at $741.25 on Monday as investors piled into the company’s bet on AI agents. Trading volume hit 48.5 million shares, well above the three-month average, The Motley Fool reported. The rally made Mark Zuckerberg about $25bn richer in a single session, lifting his fortune to an estimated $253.6bn, as Mary Whitfill Roeloffs reported for Forbes. That figure is Forbes’ own estimate, based on his roughly 13% stake, and TNW has not independently verified it.
A product with a number attached The catalyst was Muse, the personal AI agent Meta launched earlier this month with a free tier and plans at $20 and $100 a month. It books travel, sends email, and handles purchases on a user’s behalf, and in under two weeks it overtook ChatGPT and Claude in Apple’s iOS download rankings, The Motley Fool reported. Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski raised his price target on the stock from $640 to $796 the same morning. Meta “now has a story to tell” on AI, Gawrelski wrote, according to Yahoo Finance, and he pointed to subscription revenue from heavy users as the upside.
That matters because investors have spent the year asking what Meta’s spending buys. In April, the company guided capital expenditure of $125bn to $145bn for 2026, the same quarter its daily users fell for the first time, and the stock dropped 9% after hours. The superintelligence pitch Meta frames Muse as a first step towards something grander. In its launch post, the company wrote that it thinks “personal superintelligence will be one of the most transformative technologies of a lifetime”, echoing the essay Zuckerberg published this summer.
The market has now put a price on that language. Whether the product lives up to it is a separate question, and the first answers arrived fast. A rough 24 hours On the same day as the rally, Amazon blocked Muse from its store, telling users that unauthorised AI agents break its conditions of use. For an agent sold on its ability to shop for you, losing the biggest online store in the US is not a small gap.
Then, shortly after midnight on Tuesday, Meta shipped a hotfix for a flaw in the Muse Mac app, Gizmodo reported. Security researcher Patrick Wardle found that malicious software already on a Mac could hijack a user’s Muse session. Meta called the practical risk “quite low” because an attacker would first need code running on the machine, according to Gizmodo. Wardle disagreed, arguing that common social engineering tricks could get that code there.
Connect is next Meta Connect, the company’s annual hardware and developer event, runs on 23 and 24 September. The company is expected to show camera-free smart glasses built around voice commands to Meta AI and Muse, TNW reported last week, citing The Information. Wells Fargo has flagged Muse adoption as the number to watch there, Forbes reported. After Monday, Zuckerberg has about $25bn of fresh paper wealth, by Forbes’ count, riding on how it looks.
