Thursday, September 10, 2026 · 6 min read
Morning. For two years Meta has told investors that all the AI billions would one day turn into a product people actually pay for, and this week it finally showed one: Muse, an agent that books, buys and emails on your behalf.
By Wednesday the market liked it enough to put 6.55% on Meta and knock 2.28% off Alphabet, which is roughly the same money sliding one seat along inside your index fund.
Let Meerkat explain.
Meta's agent wants your calendar, your inbox and your card
Nvidia hired the crew and skipped the merger form
Ten companies, forty percent of the S&P 500
PPI at 8:30, Oracle after the bell, CPI tomorrow
SCOREBOARD
NVIDIA | MICROSOFT | ALPHABET |
META | AMAZON | ORACLE |
S&P 500 | NASDAQ | VIX |
Wednesday close. S&P down 0.5%. Meta did all the lifting and everything else leaned the other way. On the week: Nvidia +2.87%, S&P +0.06%, Nasdaq +0.59%. Live index quotes here.
ON WATCH
Meta's new errand boy
The S&P 500 slipped 0.5% on Wednesday, and one stock strolled off the other way. Meta closed up 6.55% at $653.69, and it did it on a product, not a profit number.
The product is Muse, a personal AI agent Meta switched on this week. It doesn't answer your questions so much as go and run the errands: booking travel, filling in forms, opening a browser and haggling on your behalf.
Muse is free for most people, with paid tiers at $20 and $100 a month, US only for now. Wall Street spent two years asking what Meta's AI spending would ever sell, and this was the first answer with a price tag.
Alphabet slid 2.28% the same day. Two of the ten biggest companies in your index fund basically swapped seats on the strength of one launch.
Meerkat is always fair, so here is the honest other side. Meta says Muse runs in a sealed machine of its own, never sees your passwords, and checks with you before it sends an email or spends a penny.
Then again, Meta paid a $5 billion FTC privacy fine in 2019, the biggest the agency had ever handed out. The promise and the track record are both in the room.
MEERKAT'S TAKE: Every AI product so far has just wanted a question out of you. This one wants your calendar, your inbox and your card, which is a much bigger ask wearing a much smaller coat.
THE MACHINE
Nvidia bought the crew
The Justice Department wants to know how Nvidia got hold of Groq. The $20 billion deal in December wasn't really a takeover, more a licence bolted onto a hiring spree.
On paper, Groq is still its own company. Its founder Jonathan Ross now sits at Nvidia, which walked off with a licence to the chip designs.
The whole thing hangs on a form nobody filed. Under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, a real takeover gets flagged to regulators first, and a licence plus a few job offers doesn't.
Let Meerkat translate. Buy the boat and you file the paperwork, but hire its whole crew and copy their maps, and nobody asks.
To be fair, Amazon, Microsoft and Google have all pulled the same move, and Nvidia calls it the American system rewarding the builders.
QUICK PAUSE. WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? Nvidia is the biggest holding in most US index funds, so an antitrust question over it lands in your pension. Nobody's been charged, and a request for information is a long way from a case.
SOMEONE SMART SAID
Mark Zuckerberg · Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Introducing Muse, the personal agent that understands your goals and works 24/7 to get things done for you.
Read that line again, and notice the phrase carrying the weight. It's the 24/7, and Meta means it literally. Muse keeps grinding away after you've closed the app and gone to bed.
That makes it a very different animal from a chatbot. A chatbot that answers badly costs you an afternoon, while an agent that acts badly costs you money.
Zuckerberg has been promising everyone a personal agent since a 6,500-word essay last September. Wednesday was the day it got a price list and a download button, which is where a vision quietly turns into a business with churn, refunds and support tickets.
THE CHART
Ten companies, forty percent
RBC Wealth Management and Apollo (Torsten Slok), top-10 weight in the S&P 500, as of 2026.
The ten largest companies in the S&P 500 are now about 40% of the whole index. Back in 2015 they were 18%, and even at the top of the dot-com bubble in 2000 they were only 27%.
That's why Wednesday mattered more than the flat index let on. Meta up 6.55% and Alphabet down 2.28% is two members of that top ten trading places with each other, inside the same fund, netting out to almost nothing on the screen.
Before you panic at the number, the honest other side: these ten earn real profits, unlike a lot of the class of 2000, and the share has crept up over a decade rather than spiking in a year. Being big and being a bubble are not the same thing, even when the chart makes them look alike.
WHAT TO WATCH: If those paid tiers of Muse actually sell, Meta's slice of that top ten gets bigger. If they don't, Wednesday was just a Wednesday.
HEADS UP
Nvidia plans up to 2 gigawatts of AI factories in Australia · Eight local partners, built out by 2027, with one South Australian campus designed for 800 megawatts.
China's AI chipmakers are putting prices up · Huawei's best Ascend card is up about 60% in three months to 250,000 yuan, blamed on the memory squeeze.
OpenAI files its first EU incident report · Its agents made more than 15,000 edits to a German wiki, and Brussels wants to know why the report took until September.
DeepMind scores all 9 billion human DNA mutations · A one-petabyte atlas, free for academics now and licensed through Google Cloud later.
OpenAI quietly bars rival AI ads from ChatGPT · Image and voice tools are out, which hits Adobe's Firefly. Adobe reports earnings tonight.
ON THE HORIZON
When (ET) | What |
|---|---|
Today 8:30am | PPI for August, the wholesale inflation read before tomorrow's CPI. |
Today, after close | Oracle Q1 FY27: cloud backlog, AI capex, and the borrowing behind both. |
Today, after close | Adobe Q3, first results since OpenAI barred its Firefly ads. EPS est. $4.86, per Nasdaq. |
Fri 8:30am | CPI for August. |
Wed 16, 2:00pm | Fed decision, with a fresh set of projections. |
MEERKAT ON YOUTUBE
Americans Are Drowning In Debt They Don't Even Remember They Have. A burrito is now a financial product. Paying in four instalments has quietly moved from sofas to lunch, and the bill lands months after the meal. Watch on Meerkat Explains Finance.
THE BURROW
Quick vote. Meta's Muse will book, buy and email on your behalf once you give it your accounts. Would you hand it over?
Meta's Muse will book, buy and email on your behalf once you give it your accounts. Would you hand it over?
Trivia. Jonathan Ross, the Groq founder who now works at Nvidia, built a famous AI chip at a previous employer. Which chip, and where? Answer's at the bottom of the email. No peeking.
ALSO WORTH YOUR INBOX
One newsletter Meerkat reads. Picking one up keeps this one free.
Back tomorrow at 6:30. CPI lands at 8:30, so Meerkat will already be up.
Know someone about to give a robot their card details? Forward them this.
Meerkat is not telling you to buy anything, sell anything, or short anything. Meerkat is not a financial adviser. Meerkat is a small animal with a whiteboard and a wallet it refuses to hand over. Please do not sue Meerkat.
TRIVIA ANSWER
Google's TPU. Ross started the Tensor Processing Unit as a 20% side project at Google, left in 2016 to found Groq, and arrived at Nvidia in the deal the Justice Department is now reading.