WTF is Muse?

WTF is Muse?

Meta's new AI thing, and the ₹8 lakh crore reason behind it.

Last month Meta showed off a gadget smaller than your house key.

No phone in your hand, no app to open. You press it and you talk.

They call it the Muse Charm.

Muse is Meta's new personal AI agent AI agent = an assistant that actually does tasks for you, instead of just chatting.

In the US it has a free version, a $20 a month plan, and a $100 a month plan. India doesn't have it yet.

The Charm is a palm sized thing with a 2 inch screen, cameras, 5G and a fingerprint sensor. It ships in December.

Alongside it, Meta announced VR glasses at $1,299 and Ray-Ban frames with no cameras.

Now the obvious question.

Meta makes almost all its money from ads. So why is it selling keychains and glasses?

Here's where the number gets stupid.

Meta's hardware arm, Reality Labs, has lost around $88 billion since 2020, according to its own quarterly filings and reports.

That's roughly ₹8 lakh crore. Burnt. On headsets and glasses.

For scale, we did Tata two weeks ago. The entire Tata group earned about ₹16 lakh crore in FY26.

Meta lost half of that on gadgets, and kept going.

Koi normal company itna loss leke zinda nahi rehti.

So why does it keep going?

Because Meta does not own the door you walk through.

Your phone is Apple's or Google's. The app store is theirs. The settings are theirs.

In 2021 Apple added one privacy prompt asking if an app can track you. Most people tapped no.

Meta's own finance chief then said that single change would cost the company around $10 billion in 2022.

One checkbox, on somebody else's device.

That is the entire reason for the glasses, the Charm, the headsets.

If Meta owns the device, nobody can flip a switch and take away its users.

The Brutal Reality:

It's not working yet.

Reports say the Ray-Ban Display glasses with the wrist band sold around 15,000 units in the first quarter of 2026.

Fifteen thousand. While that same arm was losing over $4 billion in three months.

And here's the part that should interest you.

In India, those AI glasses already start around ₹39,900, and Muse hasn't even landed here.

Meta is not trying to sell you a gadget this year.

It is paying ₹8 lakh crore for a door that Apple cannot close.

✍🏻 Mantra Joshi

Spotted a wrong number or something out of date? Tell me and I'll fix it.