Meta is subsidizing customers to use Muse, a product it will never monetize, which is hardly bullish. @WaterworldCapi1 found Muse a crappy product and plans to short Meta. x.com
Rittenhouse Research
AI Infrastructure, Data Centers, Neoclouds, Software & Fintech Research
Meta's reported plan to sell excess AI compute looks like a strategic move to lift its shares and ease raising capital to ramp capex toward a rumored $300B. Excess capacity is doubtful: Meta signed a $27B Nebius deal, a $21B CoreWeave expansion and reportedly 1.6GW from Crusoe, and Google reportedly capped its Gemini use for lack of capacity. After SpaceX's neocloud deals and record IPO, investors should reward monetizing capacity, so Meta's capex and model compute will almost certainly rise. x.com x.com x.com x.com
Meta looks unattractive because its fines, capital raises and AI capex make the math ugly. The stock could trade back to the $500s, while hyperscalers probably have to make those raises with equity down 15-25%. Muse looks like a fad and average users may not need AI agents, matching LogicalThesis's view. x.com x.com x.com
A small advertising beat may not sustain Meta's stock after earnings if Muse cannot show durable use and paying customers to justify rising AI spending. Muse could monetize Meta's existing merchant base through subscriptions and more ad spend, but service costs and whether users keep paying remain unproven. Strong fourth-quarter guidance or firmer Muse usage and payment data would make the outlook more positive; September's rally alone does not establish a sell-the-news outcome. x.com
Meta's strong core platform matters most, outweighing the Muse debate and a few years of cash flow. Muse will sort itself out; at worst, new product offerings raise the table stakes and thereby secure the platform moat. x.com
Meta's hundreds-of-gigawatts compute ambition looks hard to justify against the revenue a much smaller build might support. If Anthropic can generate over $70B in annualized revenue on 3GW or less, including training, hundreds of gigawatts is not a serious figure. Earlier Muse monetization than in past product cycles also makes little sense without direct integration into ad recommendations or an immediate shift in user behavior. x.com
Meta's spending to support Muse and its frontier models is likely to precede monetization, leaving the stock vulnerable to high initial 2027 expense and capex guidance. A beat-and-raise quarter is expected, but the stock could react poorly to that guidance after its recent strong performance. x.com
Meta's Muse could bring in more cash flow than any product it has launched before, making shares in the $600s a sweet bet. Muse should create immense margin expansion, synergies, new revenue streams and services. Scaling capex is shrinking net income even as revenue keeps growing. x.com
Meta's Muse market sizing may overstate adoption because it extrapolates from some of the most productivity-focused users on earth to consumers who enjoy browsing and may not want an assistant to replace discovery. Heavy capex, unproven technology and product-market fit, unclear ROI and an arguably weaker moat raise the risk of another metaverse-style spending mistake. x.com x.com x.com
Meta's hundreds of billions in AI investment have produced Muse, a free, largely undifferentiated personal assistant app that will likely never generate economics. Muse topped app-store downloads and helped fuel a two-day gamma squeeze mostly because it is new and free. Amazon has already cut it off from shopping its site, and once the novelty fades it will probably see little use given its limited utility; people actually like doing their own shopping. x.com
Meta's earnings offer little near-term upside because Muse user growth is mostly priced in and monetization remains vague. The market wants AI compute to turn into profit. Retention or paid-share commentary could help, but Zuckerberg is unlikely to provide it; SpaceX says Grokbot has 800K paid users, a high bar. Meta remains attractive long term. Higher AI capex guidance would show confidence Muse can repay the spending and be bullish for the whole AI infrastructure stack. x.com
Meta's cash generation turned negative in Q3, coinciding with the start of its share-price slide. It was Meta's first negative free-cash-flow quarter in more than a decade. A $25 billion share sale priced at $625 this week, and the shares are already below that price. x.com