Meta nears first new high in a year as Muse success showcases winning AI strategy
HS 24/09/2026
Meta Platforms just put the AI world on notice: Muse is here to play, and it’s playing for keeps. CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote address at the Meta Connect conference made it clear that he has no interest in existing in the AI era as a guest inside the ecosystem of others. That’s where Meta has lived in the smartphone era — apps on someone else’s device. Zuckerberg is intent on breaking those shackles. With Muse personal agents as the centerpiece, Meta is ramping up its efforts to build out its own hardware platform and software ecosystem offerings. In doing so, the company will not only open up new revenue streams, but transform its advertising-heavy business model in the process. Other investors like what they heard Wednesday night, too. Shares are up about 4% on Thursday to roughly $773 apiece, extending the resurgent stock’s march back to its August 2025 record close of $790. A month ago, shares were stuck in the mud below $600. Then came an impressive new AI model and, not long after that, the introduction of the Muse app , which has shot up the App Store charts and shown the promise of personal agents to the everyday consumer. Then, on Wednesday night, Meta delivered what we consider the trifecta needed to drive consumer adoption: products, pricing and privacy. META YTD mountain Meta Platforms’ stock performance in 2026. Products We’re happy to see a material expansion in Meta’s smart glasses lineup — both with new styles and a new variant to assuage privacy concerns — alongside an upgrade that brings Muse to the wearables. Glasses are a style choice, so the more styles you can offer up, the more consumers you stand to attract. Meta will also now offer a camera-free option, opening up the total addressable market to those who want a smart assistant that can whisper answers into their ear, play music and facilitate phone calls, but may not be thrilled about Muse following them into the bathroom, eyes wide open. Also helping to expand the market for Meta glasses, Zuckerberg noted that some models will come with a Food and Drug Administration-cleared over-the-counter hearing aid feature (similar to some versions of Apple’s AirPods). We also got a brand-new pair of Meta virtual reality glasses that, for the first time, may actually come in a form factor that will resonate with consumers. This is not a headset like Meta’s Quest family. These are truly VR glasses. They may not be something you’d wear on your face around town, but they look sleek and lightweight enough to wear around the house. At a $1,299 starting price, they also stand to attract a lot more interest from serious buyers than the $3,699 Apple Vision Pro, which Zuckerberg couldn’t help but call out by name. While many (including us at the Club) were wowed by the Vision Pro technology, the form factor, weight and price have stood in the way of material traction. Whether the Meta VR glasses become a hit remains to be seen, but at the very least, they offer improvements on all those Vision Pro drawbacks. The final device of the evening, the Muse Charm — a Tamagotchi-like keychain device that allows you to take your Muse agent with you anywhere — is still in testing. However, Zuckerberg said it’s still expected out by year-end. It’s not just that Meta is offering more products. It’s that these products are getting increasingly more capable. The addition of Muse to the smart glasses and VR glasses brings with it the addition of all the connectors that Muse works with, such as the OpenTable reservation system we highlighted Wednesday afternoon . And more connectors are coming to Muse, with Meta announcing Walmart , Best Buy and Gap Inc as new partners. This is in addition to partnerships disclosed earlier this week with the likes of Shopify and Expedia . At this point, Amazon blocking Muse from its marketplace looks more like the exception than it does the rule. The more connectors, the more Muse can do autonomously. The more it can do autonomously, the more tasks users will assign to it, and the greater the odds that those tasks will go beyond research or automating certain workflows, like adding events to your calendar, to include making purchases. “Meta’s ability to continue to extend these connectors is important as a way to remove friction in the user shopping and purchase process…and ultimately unlock what we believe is a $30tn consumer agentic spending TAM,” analysts at Morgan Stanley wrote in a note to clients Thursday. The firm reiterated its top pick designation on the stock, though its price target of $775 remained unchanged. JPMorgan increased its price target to $920 from $820 and reiterated its buy-equivalent overweight rating on the stock. “We expect Muse adoption and engagement to continue to ramp, with Meta beginning to prove out AI returns and leadership beyond its core advertising platform, with a TAM potentially in the tens of trillions of dollars,” JPMorgan analysts wrote. “While it is still early, we believe that Muse has the potential to become the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT.” During the keynote, Zuckerberg reaffirmed that the goal is to drive adoption and eventually monetize Muse by selling subscriptions to heavy users, but even more so, by taking a small fee on every transaction accomplished with the agent. As a result, Meta’s pricing strategy needs to be less about realizing the absolute highest gross margin on product sales and more about getting devices into consumers’ hands as quickly as possible. Pricing Meta is clearly looking to plant its flag and capture as much of the consumer market as quickly as possible. That was clear with the Muse pricing strategy — with management offering up a ton of tokens and top-tier model capabilities, even on the free tier. The “power plan” for Muse costs $20 a month, while the “maximum plan” is $100. The same can be said for the hardware offerings. With 0% financing available through Affirm and camera-enabled smart glasses that start at $249 , Meta’s pricing is very competitive. The camera-free Ray Bans start at $349, according to Meta’s website . Some of the new smart glasses are available now; others ship next month. The VR glasses will take a bit longer to hit the market, with a spring 2027 release planned. But the highly competitive pricing figures to be worth the wait for current VR headset users and folks who’ve been intrigued by the Vision Pro but have held off due to the aforementioned drawbacks. The Vision Pro is the closest comparison product on the market, though at roughly three times the starting price of Meta’s VR glasses. Though we don’t yet have pricing on the Meta Charm, we wouldn’t be shocked to learn that the company was looking to sell as close to cost (if not at cost) as possible, simply to drive usage of Muse — whether that’s to increase the number of transactions Muse completes and associated fees, or to slowly increase any type of usage so that people can’t help but upgrade to a paid monthly plan. Nevertheless, Muse Charm is on the experimental side and the consumer interest is a bit of an open question for now. But when the rest of your hardware lineup is so strong, you can afford to take risks and see whether they pay off. Privacy The biggest hurdle for the adoption of Muse and these devices will likely be privacy. Meta has to convince the public that it can be trusted. It’s no secret that Meta has a spotty track record when it comes to consumer privacy for Instagram and Facebook. That’s problematic when you’re trying to sell folks on a personal assistant that over time may well come to know more about your life than just about anyone or anything else, aside maybe from your smartphone. One of the things that has helped make the Apple ecosystem so successful is simply that people trust the company (at least relative to other Big Tech peers). Perhaps the most important thing Apple ever did was establish itself as the poster boy of privacy in technology. For that reason, Zuckerberg wisely placed a renewed emphasis on privacy during Wednesday’s keynote. Right out of the gate, he emphasized the secure virtual machines currently used by Muse — a virtual machine (VM) is a software-based computer, hosted in a data center, running an operating system. The idea is that having the agent run on a VM offers more security than if it were simply running in the cloud and sharing computing resources with other people’s agents. Better yet, Zuckerberg said an even higher level of privacy is coming via confidential VMs for Muse, which will put even more control in the hands of users and further reduce Meta’s own server-side access. With those confidential VMs, Zuckerberg said Meta “won’t be able to see that information.” Zuckerberg also said Meta is building private processing for smart glasses, with certain AI features such as live translation taking place in a secure virtual server. “This is built on the same technology that we use to keep the AI experiences inside WhatsApp private,” he said. This is going to be the big lift for Meta, convincing the world it can be trusted not only with consumers’ personal Muse interactions data, but with data from services such as Walmart and Expedia that people link to their agents to make it more autonomous. You can have the best product on the market, at the best price, but it will matter little if consumers feel the products can’t be trusted. The camera-free glasses should also help on this front in reshaping the company’s image in the eyes of consumers. But more work will need to be done. Bottom line Meta nailed it Wednesday, and Wall Street is taking notice. That’s not to say Muse should be declared the agentic winner. The real work is just beginning as Meta rushes toward monetization and more competition will likely follow, including a souped-up version of Apple’s Siri, which began a beta rollout this month. However, Meta has a game plan in place and is firing on all cylinders as the company transitions from apps that live on the hardware and in the ecosystem of others, to its own hardware platforms and ecosystem. By centering the next generation of Meta around Muse, the company is also reshaping its business model. Advertising is still the bread and butter, accounting for almost all of Meta’s projected $254 billion in revenue this year, according to FactSet, and it will likely continue representing the majority for a long time. But Muse brings something completely different and complementary. Muse monetization won’t be about addictive engagement or doom scrolling. It will be about how much time Meta can actually save you by putting a world-class expert, on just about everything, right in your pocket — or on your face. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long META, AAPL and AMZN. See here for a full list of the stocks.) 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