JPMorgan upgrades Meta after Zuckerberg says Threads rivals X in scale

Mark Zuckerberg said Meta's ↘ 1.42% Threads has reached or surpassed Elon Musk's X in scale, claiming on a podcast this week that the three-year-old platform's 500 million monthly active users put it roughly on par with its rival. Meta shares rose in premarket trading on Wednesday following the remarks, with JPMorgan upgrading the stock from neutral to overweight on Thursday.stocktwits

Zuckerberg Makes His Case — While Posting on X

Speaking on Alex Heath's Sources podcast on Wednesday, September 9, Zuckerberg addressed why he continues to post on X despite running a competing platform. "Obviously Threads is doing great, and I think it's actually either bigger than X at this point or it's like very soon about to be," he said. But he framed his presence on X as a practical matter rather than a concession, noting that AI and technology communities remain concentrated there. "To some degree, some of the community is on X, and we want to be able to engage where people are," he said.primetimer+1

The 500 million monthly active user figure was first disclosed by Meta in a June 16 blog post tied to new Threads features. That milestone puts Threads halfway toward the one billion users Zuckerberg targeted when the app launched in July 2023 as a direct response to Musk's acquisition of Twitter. X no longer publicly discloses its own user metrics, though a SpaceX filing from March 2026 cited roughly 550 million monthly active users for X and Grok combined, according to X's AI chatbot Grok.stocktwits+2

Growth Strategy and Skeptics

Meta's cross-promotion engine — funneling Instagram's Alphabet Inc. ↗ 0.61% roughly three billion users toward Threads — has been central to the platform's expansion. Independent data from Similarweb showed Threads overtaking X in daily active mobile users as early as September 2025. Critics on X questioned whether the comparison is fair, arguing that Threads' numbers are inflated by automatic account creation through Instagram.tipranks+3

Muse Launch Adds to Momentum

The podcast appearance came the same week Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent that can handle tasks like booking travel, sending emails, and making purchases. Available through a dedicated app, the web, and WhatsApp, Muse positions Meta deeper in the AI agent race alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Zuckerberg announced the Muse launch on his X account — underscoring, perhaps unintentionally, the very dynamic he described on the podcast.apnews+2