On July 30, Meta META 0.00%↑ fell almost 8% in a single session. The company had just grown revenue 28% to $60.8 billion, but earnings per share missed by 14% after legal charges and severance costs, and the story everyone ran with was that Mark Zuckerberg was pouring money into AI with no product to show for it.
The next morning I published Meta Platforms: The King of AI Monetization and argued the sell-off was driven by one-time charges while the AI inside Meta’s ad machine was already paying off, and that the market was pricing Meta like Zuckerberg didn’t have a plan. Paid subscribers also saw that Meta was one of my largest positions. Meta closed at $556.71 that day. On September 24 it closed at $777.59, which puts the stock up 39.7% in under two months by my math.
The plan I said the market was missing now has a name, and it's called Muse. Since it launched on September 8, Meta has gained 26.7% (my math), with a single 11.43% day on September 21 that added close to $190 billion in market value. I still own my shares, and I think the part of this story that matters most for the business hasn't shown up in the financials yet.
Key takeaways
Meta is up 39.7% from my July 31 call and 26.7% since Muse launched on September 8 (both my math on closing prices).
Muse logged 1.8 million iOS downloads in the U.S. and Canada in its first 12 days, ahead of ChatGPT’s 1.3 million over the same stretch.
Muse can earn money three ways: paid subscriptions at $20 and $100 a month, checkout on partner stores, and deeper engagement inside apps Meta already owns.
The agent gives Meta’s $130 billion to $145 billion capex budget something investors have been demanding since July: a consumer product people will pay for.
At $777.59, Meta trades at 22.3 times 2027 earnings, right on its five-year average, and $1,000 a share needs as little as 24.8 times if Muse lifts EPS toward the high-end estimate (my math).
What Is Meta Muse?
Picture telling your phone to find a dinner reservation for four on Friday, email the group the details, and put it on everyone’s calendar, then going back to whatever you were doing while it handles the whole thing. That’s the pitch for Muse, a personal AI agent that opens a browser, fills out forms, sends emails, books travel and pays for things through Stripe’s Link checkout, with you approving each purchase. TechCrunch reports it runs on Muse Spark, the model family Meta built specifically for this kind of multi-step work.
Most AI apps you’ve used still stop at the advice stage, where the chatbot drafts an email and you’re the one who hits send. Muse does the sending, and Meta made it available everywhere its users already spend time: a standalone app, the web, WhatsApp, and a Mac app that launched on September 17 and lets the agent work directly on your computer.
Then came Connect on September 23, where Zuckerberg called Muse the centerpiece of everything Meta is building. The company’s own Connect recap lists a wave of new shopping partners, including Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, Ulta and Wayfair, plus Shop Pay and PayPal for payments, with Expedia and Instacart on the way and work tools like Notion, GitHub and Box already connected. Meta also showed off Muse Charm, a keychain-sized gadget for talking to your agent without pulling out your phone.
Every one of those partners is a place Muse can complete a purchase, and every surface Meta adds is another way to keep people inside its ecosystem for longer, which is where the revenue case for Muse starts.
How Fast Is Muse Growing?
ChatGPT is the benchmark every AI launch gets measured against, since it became the fastest-adopted consumer app in history back in 2023, and Muse beat its opening pace. Yahoo Finance reported that Muse picked up 1.8 million iOS downloads in the U.S. and Canada during its first 12 days, compared with 1.3 million for ChatGPT over the same window, and reached about 2.8 million installs across every platform.
Muse also climbed to the number one spot on Apple’s U.S. App Store, and that’s what set off the September 21 rally. TipRanks reported that Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski raised his price target from $640 to $796 that morning, arguing that Meta’s AI launches are finally giving it a real story to tell after a year of delayed models and spending questions.
JPMorgan’s Doug Anmuth went further, writing that Muse has the potential to become “the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT,” according to The Motley Fool. After Connect, Jefferies lifted its target from $710 to $875 and Tigress Financial went from $945 to $995, per the news feeds on StockAnalysis and CNN Markets.
Downloads and price targets tell you people are excited, and that’s worth something, but I own Meta for the cash flow it can produce five years from now, so what matters is whether Muse moves the revenue and margin numbers that drive it.
How Does Muse Make Meta Money?
In July I split AI into three layers, the apps that distribute it, the models, and the infrastructure underneath, and said Meta was the rare company with a real stake in all three. Muse is the first product where all three show up at once: Muse Spark is the model, Meta’s own data centers run it, and Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp hand it to billions of people.
The bear case back then came down to one complaint: Meta doesn’t rent out cloud computing the way Microsoft and Amazon do, so there’s no clean line on the income statement that shows AI paying for itself. Muse gives Meta three new ways to fill in that line.
Subscriptions come first.
Muse is free up to a weekly usage cap, then moves to paid plans of $20 or $100 a month depending on how hard you work the agent, according to TradingKey. That’s a consumer revenue stream Meta has never really had, and the business line it lands in is already growing fast: Family of Apps “other revenue” hit $1 billion for the first time in Q2, up 73% year over year, driven mostly by WhatsApp paid messaging and subscriptions, per Meta’s Q2 earnings call.
Meta hasn’t said how many Muse users pay, so the chart below is my own illustration rather than a forecast. Every million people on the $20 Power plan works out to $240 million a year, and ten million would add $2.4 billion, which is more than half of what that entire “other revenue” line produces today on an annualized basis.
Commerce is the second lane.
Every partner Meta signed at Connect is a store where Muse can finish a checkout, and an agent that buys things for you sits right where advertisers want to be, at the exact moment someone is ready to spend. Meta’s ad business already runs on predicting what you’ll buy next, and Muse closes the loop by completing the purchase inside Meta’s own product.
Engagement is the third, and the biggest over time.
TECHi, citing Apptopia, estimates that more than 95% of Muse users also use Facebook and 63% use Instagram, which means Meta can put Muse in front of the record 3.6 billion people who use its apps every day, per 24/7 Wall St., without paying to acquire them, the same way it scaled Threads. More time spent in Meta’s apps means more ad impressions, and in Q2 ad impressions were already up 14% with the average price per ad up 12%, according to Investing.com’s breakdown of the Q2 slides.
Meta signing with AWS is part of why I'm putting every covered call premium into Amazon each week. Here's that full breakdown: Buy Alert: I'm Adding Another $15,000 To Amazon.
Owning the shares is only half of how I'm playing this. Meta pays me a tiny dividend, so this week I'm putting another $2,500 into an income position that pays me every single week, and at its recent payouts that's hundreds of dollars a year of new income landing in my account without selling a share of anything. The ticker, the math on what it pays, and why I picked it over buying more stock are below.
Paid subscribers get the rest
The $2,500 weekly income position I’m adding, and exactly what it will pay me
Why Muse finally answers the capex question that sank the stock in July
Why Meta is still a buy at $777, and the math on $1,000 a share
My position, and exactly what would make me add or trim
Does Muse Fix Meta’s Capex Problem?
Cash flow is what sank the stock in July. In Q2, Meta generated $31.9 billion of operating cash flow and spent $31.1 billion on servers, data centers and networking, leaving just $784 million of free cash flow, according to Fortune, compared with roughly $12 billion a quarter over the prior two years.
Meta isn’t slowing the spending down, either: the company expects 2026 capital spending of $130 billion to $145 billion, guided Q3 revenue to $61 billion to $64 billion, and still expects full-year operating income to come in above 2025, per its Q2 press release.
What changed in September is that all of that computing power now has a consumer product running on it, one that people are downloading faster than ChatGPT and that Meta can charge for. Muse turns the capex from a cost investors had to take on faith into the engine behind a product with a price tag, and that’s the shift that re-rated the stock. The free cash flow squeeze won’t disappear in one quarter, but the story around it has flipped from “where’s the return?” to “how fast does it show up?”
The next checkpoint is Q3 earnings, which CNBC estimates for October 27. I’ll be watching three things: whether revenue lands at the top of the $61 billion to $64 billion range, whether “other revenue” keeps growing at a 70%-plus pace now that Muse’s paid tiers are live, and whether management shares a single Muse usage number on the call.
Is Meta Still A Buy, And Can It Reach $1,000?
When I wrote the July piece, Meta traded at 17.97 times forward earnings against a five-year average of 22.28 times. The rally has used up part of that discount, but a lot less than the price chart suggests, because Wall Street expects earnings to keep climbing underneath it. The S&P Global consensus on StockAnalysis puts Meta’s 2026 EPS at $31.07 and 2027 EPS at $34.84, with revenue expected to reach $306 billion next year, up 20.4%.
At $777.59, Meta trades at 25.0 times this year’s earnings and 22.3 times next year’s (my math), which puts it right on its five-year average and about level with the S&P 500’s roughly 22 times, according to 24/7 Wall St. You’re paying a market multiple for a company growing revenue above 20% a year with 3.6 billion daily users and a brand-new product that just out-downloaded ChatGPT, and that’s why I think it’s still a great buy after a 40% run.
The consensus numbers also leave a gap Muse can close. Analysts expect revenue to grow 20.4% next year but EPS only 12.1% (my math on the two estimates), which tells you they’re assuming depreciation from the AI buildout keeps squeezing margins. Muse subscriptions and checkout fees run on data centers Meta has already paid for, so every dollar they bring in carries a high margin, and if EPS simply grew as fast as revenue next year it would land around $37.42 instead of $34.84 (my math).
On today’s consensus, $1,000 would mean paying 28.7 times 2027 earnings, which is a stretch. If Muse helps EPS keep pace with revenue, $1,000 drops to 26.7 times, and on the high-end 2027 estimate of $40.31 from the same 24/7 Wall St. piece, it’s just 24.8 times, below the 24.69 times Meta traded at on forward earnings back in 2021. Getting to $1,000 comes down to Muse adding a few dollars of EPS, and a paid product with a head start on ChatGPT’s launch pace is exactly the kind of thing that does it.
The highest target on the Street is already $1,000, 28.6% above the September 24 close. The $761 average still includes holds like BMO at $580 and Wedbush at $650, both reaffirmed this week, while Tigress lifted its target to $995 and Raymond James went from $650 to $860 on the same day.
What Could Slow Muse Down?
Amazon is the first roadblock. On September 20, Amazon started blocking Muse from checking out on Amazon.com, citing security and customer-experience concerns, according to Simply Wall St. I’m buying Amazon every single week, so I don’t take that lightly, but Meta answered it three days later by signing Walmart, Best Buy and a dozen other retailers at Connect.
Privacy is the second roadblock, since Muse asks for access to your email, calendar and payment methods, and Meta has a history people remember. Bank of America wrote that privacy and trust remain key considerations for broader adoption, per CNN, and the company is running the same gauntlet with its camera glasses right now.
The third is how little Meta has disclosed. Muse is U.S.-only at launch, and Tech Insider points out there’s still no published figure for total sign-ups or how many users are paying. Download data from app trackers is a strong early signal, but I want Meta’s own numbers before I treat Muse revenue as a sure thing.
My Position In Meta
Meta is one of the growth positions my dividends and option premiums get reinvested into, which is how I run my portfolio today. The dividend is small, but the company underneath it just found a product that could pay for the biggest spending cycle in its history.
My Income Sleeve: Another $2,500 Into FBY
My Meta shares give me the upside, but at $0.525 a share each quarter they barely register on my monthly income. So I’m adding another $2,500 to the YieldMax META Option Income Strategy ETF FBY 0.00%↑, which takes Meta’s price swings and turns them into a paycheck that lands every single week.
According to YieldMax, FBY sells call spreads on Meta to collect option premium while still participating in Meta’s share price gains, and it holds mostly Treasuries alongside its Meta options, with $125.02 million in net assets and a 1.06% gross expense ratio.
Muse made this a better time to own it. Option premiums grow when a stock starts moving the way Meta did on September 21, and FBY’s weekly payout doubled from $0.0493 a share on September 3 to $0.0983 on September 24, which works out to a 52.04% distribution rate on the issuer’s latest numbers and puts Meta’s volatility straight into my account as cash.
At the $9.83 close, $2,500 buys about 254 shares. If the latest payout holds, that’s around $25 every week and $1,300 a year, and even at the average of the last four weeks it’s about $18 a week and $919 a year (my math). Every one of those weekly payments goes straight back into my growth positions, which is the dividend wheel I’ve been running all year, and it gives me a buffer of cash coming in no matter what the market does on any given day.
The latest payment was estimated at 95.82% return of capital, which lowers my cost basis instead of getting taxed as income right away, and that’s why funds like this fit a taxable account better than an IRA. I’m using the fund rather than writing calls against my own shares because I want those shares completely uncovered for the run toward $1,000, and FBY gives up part of Meta’s upside in exchange for the weekly checks, which is exactly why it sits next to my core position instead of replacing it.
The Bottom Line
In July the market treated Meta like a company burning cash on AI with no plan, and I argued the monetization was already happening inside its apps and that Meta owned a piece of every AI layer. Eight weeks later the stock is up 39.7% from my call, Muse is out-downloading ChatGPT’s launch, and Wall Street is raising targets as high as $995. At 22.3 times next year’s earnings the stock is still priced like a market-average business, and if Muse adds even a few dollars of EPS, $1,000 a share is well within reach. Meta now has to prove that downloads turn into paying users and higher ad revenue, and October 27 is the first real test. I’m holding through it, because the setup for the next leg is better today than it was when the stock was cheap.
FAQ
What is Meta Muse?
Muse is Meta’s personal AI agent, launched September 8, 2026, that completes tasks like sending emails, booking travel and making purchases on your behalf.
How much does Muse cost?
Muse has a free tier with a weekly usage limit, plus paid plans reported at $20 and $100 a month.
How much has Meta stock gone up since Muse launched?
Meta closed at $613.48 on September 8 and $777.59 on September 24, a gain of 26.7% by my math.
Can Meta stock reach $1,000?
By my math, $1,000 equals 24.8 times the high-end 2027 EPS estimate of $40.31, below the 24.69 times forward earnings Meta traded at in 2021.
What is Meta’s forward P/E?
At $777.59, Meta trades at about 25.0 times 2026 consensus EPS of $31.07 and 22.3 times 2027 consensus EPS of $34.84 (my math).
When does Meta report Q3 2026 earnings?
CNBC estimates October 27, 2026, and Meta has guided Q3 revenue to $61 billion to $64 billion.
Sources
Price history and dividend: StockAnalysis
Q2 2026 results and guidance: Meta investor relations, Q2 call transcript
Muse launch and Connect: TechCrunch, Meta Connect recap
Download data: Yahoo Finance, TECHi
I own shares of Meta Platforms (META), the YieldMax META Option Income Strategy ETF (FBY) and Amazon (AMZN). This article reflects my own opinions and is not investment advice. Figures labeled as my math are my own calculations from the cited closing prices and filings. Do your own research before buying or selling any security.