Mark Zuckerberg’s Second Act?

Travis Hoium (0:02)

Mark Zuckerberg is back on top of Silicon Valley, and Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now.

Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoium, joined today by Lou Whiteman, and making her triumphant return, Emily Flippen. Emily, welcome back to the show.

Emily Flippen (0:19)

Hey, it's great to be here. I'm surprised you asked me back, Travis, but I'm sure I'll be bringing a lot of less than popular hot takes.

Travis Hoium (0:27)

Emily is so busy. We have to book her months in advance.

Lou Whiteman (0:30)

Yeah. I will step aside if Emily wants to come on. You know that.

Travis Hoium (0:34)

All right, guys, let's start with Meta's huge week. This has been the talk of the market.

Investors are really paying attention. Over the past month, Meta stock is up 33 percent. That is not usual for a company that is now worth nearly $2 trillion. So this is really moving markets. But I wanted to start with the devices that they talked about. They had Meta Connect this week. We had some more glasses. Those are kind of incremental changes. And then you have this new charm that is not out yet, but is going to come out at least in the next few months. Emily, when you look at Meta's device strategy here, anything get excited to you? Does having a muse agent on your face get you excited as either a user or an investor?

Emily Flippen (1:19)

I'm going to probably surprise you by saying yes. I actually do think that for the first time in a while, we're talking about Meta Connect making headlines. Because I can see genuine use cases for their hardware for the average person. Now, I'm primed to say this. I think shares of Meta were up something like 15% heading into Meta Connect. So, there was already some positivity around their AI initiatives, in particular, their AI agent muse. But the thing that got me most excited is just how practical a lot of their hardware is increasingly becoming. I'm not talking about the Tamagotchi that's a little kitschy.

But I am talking about how realistic their Meta glasses have become, especially with their partnership with RayBan. This time around, they're actually launching glasses that do not have the camera attached. I would say that this has been the biggest headline against Meta since their move into glasses and hardware has been, how creepy is it that somebody is potentially filming you with their Meta glasses on? It made people who are legitimately using Meta glasses feel weird even if they were using them in a perfectly legitimate way.

Being able to buy a pair of Meta glasses without the camera, wear them around, say, in private spaces like in your house or out in public without necessarily drawing attention, that to me is a step in the right direction.

Lou Whiteman (2:28)

Lou, what do you think?

It's a step in the right direction. Look, as someone who wears glasses, the idea of not having them take them off and not see when I'm out in public, that I guess is a selling point for me. I still don't know if I see, I still come back to this, but I don't think we give the smartphone enough credit. I still don't know if there really is the normals need a second device. I think the first device is pretty good. So I still don't think this is a big winner. I know why they're doing it. I would want to be off of these ecosystems too. They're making them slightly less useful, I guess without the camera, but more practical. It seems like it's neat, it's gimmicky, it's going to be early adapter catnip, and I don't think two years from now, this is going to really have changed the world at all.

Travis Hoium (3:18)

Lou, I want to go into what Meta is probably thinking here, because one of the themes that we've talked about in the past with Meta and with Mark Zuckerberg in particular is that he would love to own a platform. He literally renamed the company Meta Platforms, even though Meta doesn't actually have any platforms. They have apps, they are an advertising company at their core. But I don't disagree that these are really, really interesting pieces of hardware, but is this enough to become a platform? We'll talk about Muse in just a moment, but these two things go together, where Muse is going to be this AI agent, that the hardware, the glasses, the charm, the Tamagotchi charm thing is going to be the thing that you can talk to passively throughout your day if you want.