Hunterbrook goes short on Meta as Muse download estimates slip 8% from peak pace

Hunterbrook Capital is short Meta, and the trade thesis centers on Muse’s cooling growth. The fund disclosed its position on October 9, the same day its affiliated newsroom Hunterbrook Media published a report estimating that daily downloads of Meta’s AI agent have slipped from their late-September peak.

The report draws on estimates from alternative-data firm TickerTrends, and the numbers tell a two-part story: installs are cooling, while active usage keeps growing — but more slowly. Downloads averaged about 165,000 a day across the latest seven days of TickerTrends’ data, down 8.1% from roughly 180,000 the prior week. On October 6, estimated downloads were about 170,000, down 21.1% from the September 24 peak.

Daily active users reached an estimated 2.73 million worldwide on October 6, the highest reading in the TickerTrends series. But the pace of growth eased visibly: Hunterbrook calculated the count rose by an average of about 198,000 a day from September 15 to 22, then 87,000 a day the following week, and 74,000 a day in the week through October 6.

Meta did not respond to Hunterbrook’s request for comment.

Estimates, not official numbers

The usual caveats apply to third-party app data. TickerTrends’ figures are estimates, and trackers do not always agree: Sensor Tower’s data, cited in earlier reporting, put Muse past 6.6 million total installs by October 3, two weeks after launch. The Hunterbrook report is best read as a directional signal about the shape of the launch curve rather than a precise accounting.

Hunterbrook itself is not a neutral observer here: its investment arm disclosed that it holds a short position in Meta, which gains if the stock falls. That doesn’t invalidate the data, but it is relevant context for how the report is framed.

The milestone curve so far

Muse’s launch metrics have been a running story. Meta’s agent crossed 5 million downloads in about three weeks after its September 8 debut, a pace that put it ahead of early ChatGPT and Grok numbers, and Sensor Tower estimates later put installs at 6.6 million. The open question for Meta has always been conversion: whether the millions who downloaded Muse become daily users, and whether that usage can carry the enterprise push Meta is now mounting with its Meta Enterprise Platform unit.

A slowing download curve is normal for a product this far past launch. The early adopters are in, and the next wave has to come from somewhere else. For investors, though, the signal Hunterbrook is pointing at is the deceleration in active-user growth, since sustained engagement is what turns a popular app into a platform. At Meta’s launch event last month, Zuckerberg called Muse “the centerpiece of our vision for what we’re building,” per the report. Whether that centerpiece keeps growing at launch-month speed is now the number the market will watch.

The Hunterbrook report landed the same day the New York Times published its account of Zuckerberg greenlighting Muse’s launch despite known safety risks — All Things Muse covered that story here.