Meta puts Muse at the centre of its strategy: 10 million setups in six weeks, Q3 revenue of $64.6B

On Meta's third quarter earnings call on October 21, 2026, Mark Zuckerberg presented Muse, the company's personal AI agent, as the centrepiece of its AI strategy and gave its first hard usage numbers. More than 10 million people in the United States and Canada have set up Muse in about six weeks, about 25 percent of them use it on any given day, and Zuckerberg said early engagement is more than twice the level Threads achieved at launch. Commerce is the lead use case: more than a quarter of users shop through the agent, with an average purchase over $200, and Stripe had to raise credit limits in the first week as volumes exceeded expectations.

Meta reported Q3 revenue of $64.6 billion, up 26 percent year over year, capital expenditures of $34.9 billion in the quarter, and negative free cash flow of $2.1 billion, and it narrowed its full year 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $135 billion to $145 billion. The company also announced a new non-voting Class C share class, distributed as a stock dividend and effective in January 2027, to fund the AI buildout. Zuckerberg said Muse needs a more than tenfold improvement in compute efficiency over the next year to make its economics work at scale, and noted the gatekeeper problem: Amazon blocked Muse in September, and major banks are restricting outside agents from moving customer money.

Sources: PYMNTS; The Motley Fool