If there’s one stock that has repeatedly shown it knows how to make a comeback, it’s Meta Platforms (META). The company’s launch of its popular AI agent, Muse, has catapulted shares roughly 16% this week, with shares just $10 away from its August 2025 all-time closing high, as shown in Yahoo Finance’s AlphaSpace chart below. “Meta is having its moment,” KeyBanc CEO Justin Patterson told Yahoo Finance on Thursday. The analyst has an Outperform rating on the stock and just raised his price target to $900 following the Muse announcement. Candlestick chart of meta stocks so far this year. “When I look at where the stock is right now, we’re really back to historic PE levels,” Patterson said. KeyBanc’s earnings forecasts put Meta’s current valuation at between 21 and 23 times future earnings. The road here had its ups and downs. Throughout 2026, rising AI investments and falling free cash flow have spooked investors. The existential threat of social media addiction claims, which the company finally settled with 47 states in August, was also an issue. In April, shares fell more than 8% in a single day after the company announced plans to increase its spending on AI, in part due to higher input costs. In late July, Meta shares fell another 8%, with one analyst calling the company’s quarterly results “barely acceptable.” Not to mention the criticism the company endured over the years for its Metaverse initiative, which cost the company more than $73 billion over five years. “Many investors still had pretty raw feelings about Reality Labs’ investments,” Futurum CEO Daniel Newman told Yahoo Finance. Meta’s share price versus free cash flow. And in February 2022, on the stock’s worst day on record, the stock plunged more than 26% after Meta reported its first quarterly drop in daily active users and warned that an Apple iOS privacy change would wipe out $10 billion in ad revenue. The stock didn’t bottom until October of that year, only to recover until the following year. Those low points in the stock price, when investors panic, tend to be times when CEO Mark Zuckerberg cuts costs, pivots and re-anchors. “We know something about Mark [Zuckerberg]listen to investors,” Newman said. “Eventually it recovers.” Inés Ferre is a senior business reporter for Yahoo Finance. Click here for the latest technology news that will impact the stock market Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
