Lei Jun rejects Unitree windfall claim as Meta Muse lifts shares

Lei Jun denied claims that he personally made a major profit from Unitree Robotics’ listing, saying the investor was Shunwei Capital rather than himself and that the stake was an early angel venture investment, not secondary-market new share subscription arbitrage. He said Shunwei was Unitree’s only Series A investor and urged media outlets not to create traffic-driven narratives. He also said the much-discussed moment when he kicked a Unitree robot was a balance test proposed by founder Wang Xingxing. Luo Yonghao said his podcast would generally stop releasing episodes while he remains in a public-opinion storm to avoid drawing guests into the controversy.

Meta’s Muse assistant became a market catalyst after Wells Fargo raised Meta’s target share price from $640 to $796 and kept an “overweight” rating. Meta shares rose by nearly 12% on local time September 21, lifting Mark Zuckerberg’s estimated net worth by about 25 billion U.S. dollars in one day to 253.6 billion U.S. dollars. Amazon then blocked Muse from ordering on its platform, saying unauthorized AI agents violate its terms and may access user account and order data, while PayPal said it would support purchases and checkout through Muse among PayPal merchants worldwide.

The roundup also highlighted fresh AI model releases and infrastructure moves. OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna with API prices 50% lower than the promotional pricing of GPT-5.6, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 with typical-task operating costs about 40% lower than Opus 5, and Xiaomi open-sourced MiMo-V2.6. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said Alibaba Cloud aims for globally operated data centers to exceed 20GW by 2032.