Meta’s Muse Is Everywhere and Nowhere in Latest Earnings Result

Mark Zuckerberg is sticking to the plan, mostly. His company’s multiple increasingly depends on it.

In its after-the-bell third-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, Meta said it’s raising the lower bound of its capital expenditures guidance for the year, from $130 billion to $135 billion, but keeping its top-end projection steady at $145 billion. That’s calming music to the ears of Wall Street, which has had trouble sleeping lately due to AI bubble fears and mounting capex spending. Meanwhile, the rapid adoption of Meta’s AI agent Muse shows demand for AI is growing, theoretically justifying the massive capex plans. Shares of the company jumped as much as 6% in after-hours trading following the report featuring 26% year-over-year revenue growth, though significant revenue from the mostly free-to-use Muse remains almost purely theoretical.

First Muse-r Advantage

Of course, the AI agent only launched on Sept. 8, mere days before the end of the quarter on Sept. 30, meaning it had scant time to show up in the quarterly report anyhow. From an adoption standpoint, however, Muse has been a smashing success, scoring 10.9 million downloads since launch, according to SensorTower data. That’s far faster than the 123 days it took OpenAI’s ChatGPT to cross the 10 million download mark (downloads for Sam Altman’s chatbot, by the way, have dropped by 25% since Muse burst onto the scene).

That still doesn’t mean Muse’s fingerprints will be all over Meta’s quarterly reports to come, either. “This will take some time,” Zuckerberg said in a call with analysts following the report, though he did predict Muse’s revenue per user will eventually exceed that of Instagram or Facebook users and said the company may begin taking a small cut of transactions facilitated by the agent. How big of a business that is, and how soon Meta will face serious competition, both remain anyone’s guess:

• Deutsche Bank analyst Benjamin Black recently predicted that Muse’s 2030 revenue could range anywhere from $2.4 billion to $36 billion, the latter marking roughly 8% of the company’s annual revenue. Bank of America analysts said Muse “will consume capacity w/o near-term [revenue]” through at least next year.
• Citi analysts predicted earlier this month that Muse could generate $27 billion annually by 2030 and said it benefits from “first-mover advantage.” OpenAI’s Dots agent, launched weeks after Muse, remains restricted to high-paying users, while Apple’s revamped Siri AI and Google’s Gemini Spark still lack many of Muse’s agentic capabilities. The winner may ultimately be whichever agent is most trusted with credit card privileges.

Split Decision: Zuckerberg said compute remains the biggest constraint to Muse’s global rollout, which is why the company is spending so much on data centers. It has a new plan to pay for them too, saying it will issue one nonvoting Class C share for each Class A and Class B share held in January, marking an effective two-for-one stock split, to fuel its investments. It may need to consider a similar plan to foot its legal bills, too: A nearly $10 billion hit weighed on its quarterly results, while a New Mexico judge ruled Wednesday that the company must pay a $25 billion penalty in a case stemming back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.