Meta Platforms stock surged on Monday, driven by strong market reception to the company’s new Muse personal AI assistant and a significant price target upgrade from Wells Fargo. Shares climbed approximately 7% to reach around $710 during trading hours after closing Friday at $665.75, with some reports noting an increase of more than 10% to 11% in intraday trading.
Meta Stock Surges Following Muse AI App Launch
The Muse application debuted in the United States on September 8 and quickly ascended to the top position in Apple’s U.S. App Store free apps category, overtaking OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The tool is also currently ahead of other popular services on the iOS app store, including Polymarket, Kashi, Anthropic’s Claude, SpaceXAI’s Grok AI, and the Facebook-parent company’s own Meta AI app. According to estimates from the analytics firm Sensor Tower, the application accumulated over 730,000 U.S. downloads within its initial window, reaching a peak of 264,000 downloads on September 19. Sensor Tower data cited by Wells Fargo indicated that daily active users reached 448,000 a day earlier.
Analyst Price Target Increase and AI Strategy Shift
In response to the early momentum, Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski elevated the firm’s price target for Meta from $640 to $796 while maintaining an Overweight rating. The upgrade reflects growing conviction in Meta’s AI development roadmap and provides investors with fresh evidence that the company’s substantial infrastructure investments—anticipated to range between $130 billion and $145 billion in capital expenditures this year—may yield a consumer product with broad appeal.
Unlike conventional chatbot interfaces, Muse functions as a task-completion agent powered by Meta’s Muse Spark family of models. The application is designed to help consumers manage digital assistants that perform multi-step operations across the web, such as arranging travel plans, dispatching emails, completing electronic forms, organizing email inboxes, and conducting online shopping. Meta pitches the tool as a major push into the AI agent market by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, offering the app for free alongside monthly subscription options priced at $20 or $100 depending on usage. This subscription model creates a potential new revenue stream for Meta that is not centered on its core online advertising business.
Integration Challenges and Upcoming Company Events
As Muse rolls out, third-party platform integration challenges have already begun to emerge. Amazon has blocked access to its site for the Muse bot, preventing the agent from executing purchases on Amazon.com and citing privacy and security risks. An Amazon spokesperson stated that third-party applications offering to make purchases on behalf of customers should operate openly and respect service provider decisions regarding participation. Meta has not yet publicly detailed how it plans to address Amazon’s objection.
In contrast, e-commerce platform Shopify is working with Meta on Muse access, with Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke announcing a partnership to allow agentic checkout in online stores. To address broader data privacy concerns, Meta states that Muse operates within a protected virtual machine environment, mandates approval for sensitive operations, and empowers users to determine which specific services the agent can access.
Market attention now turns toward the upcoming Meta Connect conference kicking off on Wednesday. Investors expect CEO Mark Zuckerberg to deliver a keynote outlining upcoming plans across AI and wearable devices, alongside additional data and potential feature announcements for the Muse application.