Meta's stock jumped roughly 11,4 percent on Monday, adding 25,5 billion dollars to Mark Zuckerberg's fortune in a single trading session, more than any other member of the world's top ten wealthiest people gained that day, including Elon Musk, whose own holdings rose by 12 billion dollars. Zuckerberg's estimated wealth now stands at 254,1 billion dollars, putting him sixth on Forbes' Real Time Billionaires list, about 14,5 billion dollars behind Sergey Brin.
The immediate trigger was Wells Fargo raising its price target on Meta from 640 to 796 dollars a share while keeping an overweight rating, timed just ahead of this week's Meta Connect conference. Analysts framed the move around a specific number they now intend to watch closely, usage of Meta's new AI assistant, rather than the metrics that have driven Meta's stock in past years.
That assistant is Muse, an autonomous AI tool Meta launched earlier this month that can book travel, send emails and manage connected home devices without step by step direction. Zuckerberg has described Muse as a step toward what he calls personal superintelligence spread across Meta's platforms, a phrase that reframes the company's AI ambitions around assistants that act on a user's behalf rather than simply generating text or images on request.
Behind Muse sits an infrastructure bet large enough to explain why investors are paying attention now. Zuckerberg has committed tens of billions of dollars to Nvidia's most powerful chips while simultaneously building Meta's own custom silicon, giving the company one of the largest private AI computing operations anywhere, and the strategy is starting to extend into hardware, smart glasses, bracelets and earbuds meant to carry Meta's AI assistants directly on a user's body rather than through a phone screen.
Meta Connect, running September 23 and 24, is where the company plans to make that pivot concrete, with camera less smart glasses and deeper Muse integration expected among the announcements. For Zuckerberg personally, the timing means a fortune that just posted its best single day in recent memory is about to be tested again almost immediately, this time by whether the products Wall Street just rewarded him for promising actually work the way he has described them.