While competition in the C (AI) industry stiffens, Elon Musk has kept the ball rolling by alleging that his AI firm, xAI, has recently recruited some top guns in engineering talent from Meta without resorting to outrageous amounts of cash offered as salaries.
Musk’s comments referred to a post illuminating how some of OpenAI’s researchers had turned down rich job offers from Meta’s chief Mark Zuckerberg. Musk took this opportunity to intimate that many of the talented Meta engineers have either joined or are about to join xAI, and not due to a pay package inflated beyond reason. According to Musk, although there is “great” pay, xAi has avoided that “insane initial comp” with which Meta reportedly shoves talent to its store.
“Many strong Meta engineers have and are joining xAI and without the need for insane initial comp (still great, but not unsustainably high),” he wrote, claiming that xAI has “vastly more” market cap growth potential than Meta.
ZUCK DESPERATE MOVE
“90% of OpenAI researchers rejected Meta because they believed openAI is the closest to AGI”
does zuck not trust the Meta team?
he’ll toy with poaching talent for a few months… to slow others down
without any real plan to build something useful. pic.twitter.com/mmkVOgseqT
— Haider. (@slow_developer) August 3, 2025
Hyper-Merit-Based and Performance-Focused xAI
Elon Musk termed xAI as a hyper meritocratic organization where reward would be closely linked to performance. He added that anyone who “does something great” would expect their salaries to “shift substantially higher”, putting pressure on rewards that are sustainable, and performance driven rather than upfront extravagance.
Musk said this amid a continuous AI talent war where, according to reports, AI researchers have received offers from companies such as Meta for compensation packages costing as high as $250 million to join their teams. This strategy of poaching has drawn quite a number of criticisms from industry leaders.
Meta’s AI Recruitment Strategy under Fire
Dario Amodei, Chief Executive Officer of Anthropic AI, criticized Meta’s strategy recently by stating that Zuckerberg’s hard offers bring down the scale of equity and fairness within the industry. “If Mark Zuckerberg throws a dart at a dartboard and it hits your name, that doesn’t mean you should be paid 10 times more than your equally talented peer,” said Amodei.
He went on to say that buying something that can’t be bought can refer to the Mission-driven AI research work, whose efforts transcend compensation.
Amid all this, as the race for AI heats up, this xAI approach looks to offer a more sustained alternative with good motive compared to Meta’s hunt for talent with a billion-dollar bounty.
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