A 44-minute call and a memo: How Alexandr Wang won Mark Zuckerberg’s trust—and a $100 billion-plus AI bet
Fortune Emma Witman
Meta is spending huge money on AI after Zuckerberg recruited Alexandr Wang to run its new lab. The bet is already drawing eye rolls, because the last giant Meta moonshot was the metaverse.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Emma Witman — read the original for the full story.
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Mark Zuckerberg is back in giant-bet mode. After burning through tens of billions on the metaverse, he’s now pouring even more into Muse, Meta’s personal AI agent, and into the lab led by Alexandr Wang, the 29-year-old Scale AI cofounder he picked to run Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Muse is already getting traction in the real world. The app launched in the U.S. on Sept. 8 and, within about two weeks, had become the most popular free app on Apple’s App Store, with more than 2.5 million downloads, according to Sensor Tower data cited by CNN. On Monday, Meta also introduced Muse Wonder, which it described as the first frontier-class model from the lab.
The money behind all this is eye-watering, even by Meta standards. Zuckerberg said he and Wang discussed a check of roughly $100 billion to $200 billion late last year. Meta now expects 2026 capital expenditures of $130 billion to $145 billion, almost double the $72.2 billion it spent last year, and investors have reacted badly to every upward revision.
The partnership started with a 44-minute WhatsApp call in April 2025, after Meta’s Llama 4 models got a lukewarm reception. Two days later, Wang sent Zuckerberg a memo laying out what he’d do in Zuckerberg’s place. The advice was blunt: focus on talent density, and be willing to start over if needed. Zuckerberg said he had already been impressed by Wang for years and, after talking to the heads of research across AI, settled on him anyway.
Meta then went on what Zuckerberg called a “supernova” recruiting push. The company paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI to bring Wang in, reportedly offered $100 million packages to some OpenAI researchers, and kept the core research team at under 200 people, closer to 100 by Wang’s count, inside a company of about 75,000 employees. Muse Spark came first in April, followed by updates and now Muse Wonder, which Wang says is state-of-the-art by Meta’s own measurements for personal and professional agent tasks. Independent rankings are less dramatic: Artificial Analysis puts the flagship model roughly alongside OpenAI and Anthropic, just behind the leader.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when a company mistakes boldness for strategy and then tries to buy its way out of embarrassment. Meta may have found a sharper operator in Wang, but the industry has seen enough giant checks dressed up as vision to know the difference between conviction and a very expensive mood. The real product here is not Muse; it’s Zuckerberg’s willingness to keep swinging after the metaverse bruise.
Read more about this at: Fortune
