META
Meta’s trying to make AI pay rent
Meta’s Muse personal AI agent is barely out of the newborn stage, but Citi is already treating it like a future money printer. The bank says Muse could pull in more than $27 billion a year by 2030, mostly by helping people shop, book travel, and complete transactions with a little AI-assisted hand-holding.
The download counter is doing a lot of the heavy lifting
Muse has crossed 6.6 million downloads since launching on Sept. 8 and hit 1.8 million daily active users, which is a pretty solid start for something that basically wants to become your internet butler. It even reached No. 1 on the U.S. App Store within 10 days, which is the kind of momentum that gets investors imagining a giant new revenue lane.
Citi thinks the money could come from two buckets:
- roughly $23 billion from transaction-related revenue
- about $4.5 billion from subscriptions
That said, the model isn’t exactly on easy mode. Amazon has already blocked Muse from its shopping site, which is corporate speak for: “Nice try, but you don’t get to sit at our table.”
The AI arms race is getting weirdly personal
Meta isn’t racing just to build the smartest model anymore. It’s trying to become the default assistant people trust with everyday tasks, while OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are all pushing their own always-on agents. In other words, the winner may not be the best brain—it may be the one you let into your wallet.
And Meta has a huge distribution edge: the company says it reaches 3.6 billion people daily across its apps. That’s a lot of potential users to nudge from doomscrolling to delegating.
Why investors should care
The catch is that Meta is spending like it’s building the future and paying for it in real time. The company expects 2026 capex of $130 billion to $145 billion, and it burned through $31.08 billion in Q2 alone while free cash flow sank to $784 million.
So the whole story comes down to this: can Muse grow from shiny toy to serious revenue engine before investors get twitchy about the bill?
Big picture: Meta doesn’t need to win the AI model crown to win the money race. If Muse becomes a trusted shopping-and-booking shortcut, that could be the kind of product that makes all those GPU invoices feel a lot less painful.