Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s headquarters, where aggressive AI recruiting underscored Meta’s ambition in the superintelligence arms race (Reuters)
As the tech battle intensifies, Mark Zuckerberg is determined to ensure Meta has access to the top talent for AI development. According to reports, in 2025, Zuckerberg made numerous offers, not all of which were accepted, in an attempt to snatch talent away from Apple and other tech behemoths like OpenAI.
In 2025, Meta, under the CEO Mark Zuckerberg, waged an unparalleled campaign to attract top-tier AI specialists. The company unleashed staggering pay packages; for example, the co-founder of a Thinking Machines Lab was lured with an offer as high as $1.5 billion and other offers in the range of $200 million to $500 million over multi-year contracts for others. Altogether, the total compensation offered surpassed the sum of the U.S. box-office grosses for Marvel's Avengers and Superman, which was released in 2025.
And not for one or two talents. Meta has reportedly extended multi-year packages valued at about $2.6 billion to a wide range of individuals, including a ramp record of $250 million for a prominent young AI researcher who turned down an inferior offer initially.
Not all these enormous offers were accepted, though. Andrew Tulloch, for instance, chose to stay with his startup instead of accepting Meta's $1.5-billion offer, along with some of the other members of the ill-fated Thinking Machines Lab.
The aggressive recruitment sparked debate within the industry. Anthropic's Dario Amodei cautioned that internal culture might suffer under a compensation-centric approach. Mission alignment, not financial lure, would better serve the interests of the company in the long run.
In fact, high-value hiring packages are an irrational response to the sheer scale of investment necessary to build world-class AI platforms, according to former Google HR chief Laszlo Bock. Critics also questioned whether such high-dollar offers-sometimes referred to as Zuck Bucks were sustainable or healthy in the long run. According to Reuters, while such tactics made a bit of a splash, some applicants continued to spurn monumental paychecks in favor of more mission-driven environments.
The performance of the greatest Marvel and DC movies is greatly surpassed by Zuckerberg's offer. "Avengers: Endgame" and "Superman" (2025) are two examples of movies with large budgets and ensemble casts that frequently bring in a lot of money at the box office.
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