Meta to issue non-voting stock for AI buildout as Muse assistant passes 10 million users

Meta paired strong third-quarter results with two pieces of AI news on Wednesday: a plan to create a new class of non-voting stock that gives it a fresh way to finance its artificial intelligence buildout, and confirmation that its Muse assistant has passed 10 million users.

According to TechCrunch, Semafor first reported that Meta was weighing the issuance of non-voting shares, and chief financial officer Susan Li confirmed the plan during the earnings call. The new stock will be distributed to existing shareholders as a dividend and is intended to become a publicly traded, non-voting instrument Meta can use for raising capital, compensating employees and making acquisitions, all while leaving the voting power of current Class A and B shareholders untouched. Li said the structure preserves Meta's founder-led governance and broadens its funding options at a moment when AI is driving momentum across the business.

A strong quarter with sharply rising costs

Meta posted $64 billion in quarterly revenue, up 26% year over year and ahead of Wall Street expectations. Costs and expenses climbed far faster, rising 68% from a year earlier, a measure of how expensive the AI infrastructure push has become. That gap between spending and revenue growth is the backdrop for the new share class: Meta wants more financial firepower to fund compute without asking shareholders to give up any control.

Muse crosses 10 million users, with shopping in the lead

Mark Zuckerberg said more than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set up Muse personal agents in about a month and a half, a figure that confirms estimates released earlier in the week by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. He added that Muse has held the number one spot in the App Store almost every day, and that roughly a quarter of everyone who sets up the agent now uses it daily.

Shopping stood out. Over a quarter of engaged users who bought things through the agent had an average purchase size above $200, a figure TechCrunch described as surprising even to industry insiders. Muse uses fintech company Plaid's connector to enable agentic shopping, and Zuckerberg said Plaid told Meta it had never seen comparable activity from any other service using its connector. Other popular uses include personal productivity, such as connecting Muse to email and calendars, which Zuckerberg cited as evidence that users trust the product's security setup — including a feature called Muse Secure VM and a forthcoming Muse Confidential VM that would keep user content hidden even from Meta itself.

Scaling next, funded by commerce

Zuckerberg declared that Muse has reached product-market fit and said Meta is moving into an operational phase focused on scaling, revenue and compute efficiency. The plan is to keep Muse free for most users while Meta takes a percentage of the commerce conducted through it; power users wanting the most advanced models or more tokens would pay. Zuckerberg predicted Muse will eventually earn more revenue per user than Meta's family of apps does today — currently several hundred dollars annually per user — and said it should turn profitable once revenue reaches scale. To support that, Meta is building compute capacity to serve more than a billion people over the next few years and expects to improve Muse's cost efficiency by more than 10x within a year.

Muse will also anchor Meta's smart glasses strategy, and Zuckerberg teased a future "Muse network" in which a person's agent could work with agents belonging to friends, family and businesses, so buying something means talking to a shop's agent rather than navigating its website.

Losses and legal clouds

Reality Labs, the division behind AR glasses, VR headsets and metaverse software, keeps losing billions. TechCrunch's two reports on the earnings gave differing expectations for the division: one said losses should shrink from 2025 levels to between $18 billion and $19 billion, while the other described an improvement from $19.1 billion in 2025 to $15 billion this year.

Li also flagged continued regulatory and legal exposure, citing scrutiny of youth-related issues in several markets and a number of youth-related trials scheduled in the coming months in the United States.

Why it matters

Meta is effectively designing a new financing instrument for the AI capex era. A tradable non-voting share lets the company raise money, pay staff and acquire companies without diluting Zuckerberg's voting control — a structure that, if it works, other founder-led tech giants may copy to fund their own compute buildouts. The Muse numbers are also among the clearest signals yet that consumer AI agents can drive real transactions rather than idle chat: average purchases above $200 and record Plaid connector activity suggest agentic shopping could become a substantial revenue line, one Meta claims may eventually out-earn its ad-funded apps on a per-user basis. The tension to watch is cost. With expenses growing 68% against 26% revenue growth, the whole plan depends on Muse scaling efficiently enough to pay for it.