Meta Climbs to a Fresh High as Analysts Raise Targets After Connect

Meta Platforms rose 4.5% on Thursday, closing at $777.59, its highest close in months. The gain came as the company wrapped a two-day product event and a string of Wall Street analysts lifted their price targets. Trading was heavy. The move capped a September that has treated the shares well.

Higher targets followed the Connect showcase

Meta held its Connect event on Wednesday and Thursday at its California headquarters. There it detailed new features for Muse, its consumer AI assistant, introduced a pocket device called Muse Charm, and refreshed its smart-glasses lineup, including a new Ray-Ban model and an audio-only pair. The company laid out the announcements on its own site the same week.

Around the event, several banks lifted their price targets. JPMorgan moved to $920 and kept an Overweight rating, pointing to Meta’s plan to eventually charge a small fee on purchases completed through its Muse assistant. Piper Sandler went to $875 from $785, also citing early adoption of Muse and a similar model for taking a cut of commerce transactions. Tigress Financial set the highest number of the group at $995. The targets kept climbing.

The optimism rests on a business that barely exists yet. Muse is new, and the plan to earn money from purchases made through it has not begun to show up in sales. The targets reflect where analysts think it is heading.

A 36% climb in a month

Thursday’s pop sits on top of a much larger run. Meta has gained 36.4% over the past 30 days and now trades 44% above its lowest point of the last three months. Volume rose too. Some 34.8 million shares changed hands, roughly 1.6 times the 20-day average of 22.2 million, so the buying was not thin. Thursday’s close was the highest in at least three months, above the prior peak of the period. For a company already among the largest in the market, a one-day move of this size adds tens of billions of dollars in market value.

The scale of the September advance is the part worth sitting with. A gain of more than a third in a month is unusual for a company this large, and it has carried the stock more than $200 above its three-month low near $539. Much of that climb tracks the enthusiasm around Muse rather than any change in what Meta earns today.

The next earnings land in late October

Meta is expected to report third-quarter results in late October, its next scheduled read on whether the AI spending is turning into revenue. At Connect, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg teased a next-generation model under the working codename Watermelon. The company set no date for it.

The spending question sits underneath the optimism. Meta is pouring money into data centers and chips to build these AI services, and the bill lands well before the revenue does. That is the tension in the shares right now: a clearer story about charging for AI, weighed against how much it costs to deliver. The late-October report is the next place both sides get tested.

This is a general-market summary for information only — not investment advice, and not a recommendation regarding any security.