The stock hit a 52-week high on the opening day of Meta Connect as Wall Street raised its targets. The price targets rest on outside download counts and on assumptions about how many users will pay.
Meta Platforms shares traded to a 52-week high of $761.27 on Wednesday morning, the opening day of the company's Connect developer conference. The stock rose more than 2% on a day the Nasdaq Composite fell more than 1%, after an 11% jump on Monday.
The catalyst is Muse, the personal AI agent Meta launched on Sept. 8 with subscription tiers of $20 and $100 a month. The app has held the No. 1 spot on Apple's U.S. App Store since Friday and has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times since launch, according to market intelligence firm SensorTower.
Wall Street has responded with a cluster of higher targets. JPMorgan reiterated an Overweight rating and an $820 price target, saying Muse could become "the most widely used consumer AI application since ChatGPT." BofA Securities analyst Justin Post kept a Buy rating and an $810 target, citing Muse's early reception as improving sentiment on Meta's AI strategy. KeyBanc raised its target to $900 and Cantor Fitzgerald to $860.
Evercore ISI's Mark Mahaney offered an illustration of the upside. If 1% of Meta's roughly 3.6 billion users paid for the $20 tier, he calculated, Muse would generate about $8 billion in incremental annual revenue. Truist Securities projects Muse could add $28.5 billion of incremental revenue by 2030.
Those numbers share a gap. Meta has not disclosed how many people use Muse daily, how many have subscribed, how long they stay or how much revenue the product has produced. The download count is an outside estimate. The 1% conversion rate in Mahaney's example is a hypothetical, not an observed figure.
That does not make the targets wrong. It means the four price targets, spread across a $90 range, are four different bets on data the company has yet to publish.
Muse's own obstacles are visible already. An Oppenheimer survey of U.S. consumers found only 8% would trust Meta with their passwords, compared with 30% who would trust Google. That matters because Muse becomes more useful as users connect their email, text messages and calendars. Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its site on Sunday, saying it had not authorized the agent's access. "We think it's fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate," an Amazon spokesperson said.
Competition is also on the way. "Give Google and OpenAI a couple weeks and they'll duplicate whatever is out there," said Truist analyst Youssef Squali. "At least, as of now, I think the narrative around Meta has been changing."
Connect gives Meta its first formal chance to replace outside estimates with its own figures. A disclosed user count, subscriber number or retention rate would give investors a way to check the analyst math. Without one, the stock's next move depends on how long a No. 1 app ranking can carry a valuation by itself.