Meta surges over 10% after Wells Fargo lifts price target to $796 amid AI hype and Amazon block

META extended gains to more than 10% on Monday, September 21, after Wells Fargo lifted its price target to $796 from $640 and kept an Overweight rating ahead of the company's Connect developer conference. SentiSense data had the stock at $741.25, up 11.3% intraday. It was Meta's biggest single-day gain since July 2025 and added about $190 billion in market value.

The catalyst was an analyst call rather than a reported result. Wells Fargo tied the raise to recent model launches and early traction for Muse, Meta's agent that sends emails, books travel and fills out forms and keeps running after the user closes the app. The important detail is the timing: the target went up before Connect, not after it, so investors are paying for usage metrics the company has not published. The move was Meta-specific rather than a sector repricing, with the Technology Select Sector SPDR up 1.72%, the Invesco QQQ Trust up 1.88%, Alphabet up 2% and MSFT essentially flat at 0.03%.

Cutting the other way, AMZN blocked Muse from shopping on its marketplace, a restriction in place by Sunday evening, September 20. Users hit a popup reading that continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use. Amazon's stated objections are more specific than a generic policy breach: Meta sought no authorization, the agent does not identify itself while browsing, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials. A spokesperson said agentic applications "have the same obligations, and we've requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience". Meta declined to comment on the block; its only relevant statement is from the Muse launch, that the agent "has no visibility into people's passwords or payment methods". This is not an isolated action. Amazon has sued Perplexity over its Comet browser and restricted shopping agents from Google and OpenAI, while running its own, and one outlet framed the motive around the roughly $68 billion in advertising revenue Amazon booked last year.

The two legs leave a genuinely mixed setup. Wells Fargo's $796 target now sits above the $755.28 average across the 56 analysts SentiSense tracks, so the firm is out ahead of the street rather than catching up to it, and Oppenheimer's Jason Helfstein has publicly doubted Muse will reach financially meaningful scale, citing paid conversion, competition and consumer trust. If an agent's commercial value depends on transacting on other companies' platforms, the marketplaces get a vote. Connect later this week and third-quarter earnings on October 28 are the next places Meta could put numbers behind the story.