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Meta confirmed on its Q3 earnings call that Muse, its AI app, has topped 10 million users, matching an earlier estimate from Sensor Tower. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said about a quarter of users open Muse daily, and more than a quarter of engaged shoppers using the agent spend over $200 on average per purchase, a figure he said surprised payments partner Plaid.
Meta reported record third-quarter revenue of $64.6 billion and announced plans for a stock split alongside the creation of a new class of shares intended to help finance its artificial intelligence investments. The company said the new share class will not alter Mark Zuckerberg's existing voting control.
A Santa Fe district court judge reduced a potential $219.5 billion jury-calculated fine to a $25 billion penalty against Meta, following a September jury verdict finding the company liable for misleading New Mexico residents about its data collection and safeguarding practices. The jury found more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices act, and the judge set the penalty at the maximum $5,000 per violation, with 15% annual interest until paid in full.
Meta disclosed in its third-quarter earnings that income from operations would have been $22.89 billion if not for a $9.89 billion charge tied to its child safety settlement with US attorneys general. The company agreed in August to pay $17.1 billion to resolve claims that its platforms were designed to be addictive to children, though $5.3 billion of that is contingent on YouTube and TikTok adopting similar safety safeguards. Despite the charge, Meta still reported $64.60 billion in quarterly revenue, up 26 percent year-over-year.
The Instagram account for the 'No Kings' protest movement was suspended for about an hour during this past weekend's nationwide demonstrations, with admin access locked for several more hours. Some supporters suspected Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg deliberately silenced the account given his recent alignment with Trump, though commentators Will Robinson and Tim Chambers argue intent is beside the point.
Security researchers at Claroc found that Meta's Muse AI assistant embedded conversation titles in subdomains, making shared chat links discoverable through public passive DNS records. The firm enumerated roughly 6,800 shared Muse conversation links with a single DNS query and found sensitive personal and business information inside many of them. Meta has suspended the sharing feature while it evaluates changes.
Security researchers at Claroc found that Meta's Muse AI agent generated shareable web links for user chat logs that could be discovered and opened by outsiders. Using a lookup dataset of visited URLs, investigators retrieved over 6,800 Muse share links in a single search, revealing private material such as corporate revenue documents, loan applications, bank transaction details, income data, and a workplace vacation calendar. Meta told Ars Technica it has disabled the sharing feature.
A new analysis of AI hiring trends finds that engineers are less swayed by billionaire founders' personal pitches, grand visions, or unusual recruiting tactics than by whether a company has a real, shippable product. The report cites examples like Mark Zuckerberg personally delivering soup to OpenAI researchers and Elon Musk promising to read every SpaceX AI application himself as signs of how aggressive recruiting has become, even as such gestures reportedly fail to outweigh practical considerations for candidates.
Several upcoming movies and shows this season dramatize the lives of Silicon Valley figures, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk. Among this wave of founder-focused projects, one involving Nathan Fielder is being singled out as the standout entry.
A video clip of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wincing after drinking a Guinness circulated widely online, drawing significant attention and commentary. The moment became a talking point largely because it showed an unscripted, relatable reaction from a billionaire tech executive.
A new wave of films and documentaries, including 'The Social Reckoning' and a Musk documentary by Alex Gibney, dramatize and investigate the personal conduct of major tech executives. These productions draw on existing investigative journalism, such as Frances Haugen's whistleblower allegations against Meta, to portray figures like Mark Zuckerberg in a far less flattering light than earlier works like 'The Social Network'.
In an interview on the Founders podcast, Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang said CEO Mark Zuckerberg writes long, precise responses to his questions with unusual speed, something he first found puzzling before joining Meta last year. Wang, previously CEO of Scale AI, said the two have communicated via WhatsApp since being introduced around 2021-2022 by Meta executive Alex Schultz.