An almost 12% surge in Meta Platforms shares on Monday fueled by a raise in Wells Fargo’s price target on the stock and investor confidence in a new an autonomous AI assistant called Muse lifted founder Mark Zuckerberg’s estimated net worth to $253.6 billion, a $25 billion increase in a single day.
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Key Takeaways
- The initial rise in Meta stock Monday morning increased Zuckerberg’s net worth by $12.9 billion but, by midday, the stock had rallied even further and his single-day gain had increased to $25 billion.
- Zuckerberg held the No. 6 spot on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list as of 2 p.m. ET Monday, sitting roughly $14.5 billion behind No. 5 Sergey Brin at $268.1 billion.
- His single-day estimated gain outpaces every other move on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires top 10 Monday, including No. 1 Elon Musk’s $12 billion rise.
- The surge in the value of Meta shares comes after Wells Fargo raised the stock’s price target to $796 from $640 on Monday, keeping an overweight rating heading into the Meta Connect conference later this week, with Muse use statistics flagged as the key metric to watch.
- Meta launched Muse earlier this month—an autonomous AI assistant that can book travel, send emails and manage connected home devices—which Zuckerberg described as a step toward delivering “personal superintelligence” across Meta platforms.
What to watch for
Meta Connect 2026 will take place on Sept. 23 and 24. The event is expected to focus on Meta’s movement away from virtual reality and toward AI, agentic software and smart wearables. Meta is widely rumored to be revealing a new pair of smart glasses without built-in cameras and analysts expect updates to Muse, including building them into glasses so the AI can “see” and “hear” what users do.
Key background
Meta has been working toward its AI pivot for more than a decade—it launched Facebook AI Research (FAIR) in 2013 and introduced its large language model Llama, a competitor to ChatGPT, in 2023. Meta last year integrated its AI model into its core family of apps (WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook) and gave hundreds of millions of users access to its AI assistant. Zuckerberg has pledged tens of billions of dollars toward acquiring vast numbers of super-powerful computer chips from Nvidia and building its own custom-made chips from scratch. Meta owns one of the largest private AI compute footprints in the world and is moving toward AI-equipped hardware like glasses, wristbands and earbuds.
Forbes valuation
Zuckerberg founded Facebook when he was 19 years old as a way for students to match names with photos of classmates. He took the company public in 2012 and now owns about 13% of its stock.
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