Meta shares rose about 11.4% on September 21 to close at $741.25, the stock's best day in more than a year, per Yahoo Finance, on demand for Muse, the personal AI agent Meta launched on September 8, per Axios. The stock had already gained about 6.5% on September 9. Muse topped the US App Store and Google Play charts and passed 902,000 downloads in its first six days, per The Motley Fool. Wells Fargo raised its price target to $796 from $640.
Muse costs nothing at the base tier, $20 a month for Power, and $100 a month for Maximum, and the paid tiers buy more agent usage. That pricing follows the cost structure. Each Muse runs in its own dedicated cloud virtual machine, Muse Secure VM, alongside a separate Sentinel agent that must approve anything it sends to the internet, per Meta. A dedicated machine per user is a real compute bill, and advertising alone would struggle to pay it at the usage a task-running agent generates.
The two largest consumer AI companies are now trading business models. Meta, which earns nearly all its revenue from ads, is charging subscriptions for its agent. OpenAI, which built its consumer business on subscriptions, put advertiser-run agents inside ChatGPT last week and reports ads at a $1 billion run rate. Each wants what the other has. An agent that books, buys, and emails costs more to serve than a chatbot that answers, and neither model covers that alone.
Bottom Line
Meta is testing whether consumers will pay monthly for an agent, and the early download and stock numbers say investors think they will. Watch Meta Connect on September 23 and 24 for subscriber figures, since downloads measure curiosity and paid tiers measure the business.