Elon Musk Reveals High-Paid Recruitment of Top Meta Engineers for xAI

Tech billionaire, Elon Musk, claims his AI startup, xAI, is attracting Meta engineers without exorbitant salaries, emphasizing its merit-based culture and growth potential. This comes amid reports of Meta's aggressive AI talent acquisition, fueled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg's push to build a top-tier team for its Superintelligence Labs or super artificial intelligence.

AI Race

Elon Musk has broken silence on the ongoing talent war in Silicon Valley. The unprecedented AI talent war is said to have been started by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for the company's of its Superintelligence Labs.

And almost all technology companies -- big and small -- are reportedly impacted by it. Be it Apple, Google, Microsoft or not-so-known companies (till a few months ago) like Windsurf and others.

Responding to all the buzz on Meta giving million-dollar joining bonuses, Zuckerberg told investors: “We’re building an elite, talent-dense team. If you’re going to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a computer and building out multiple gigawatts of clusters, then it really does make sense to compete super hard and do whatever it takes to get that, you know, 50 or 70 or whatever it is, top researchers to build your team.”

He added, “There’s just an absolute premium for the best and most talented people.” During the earnings call last week, the company said capital expenditures will go up to $72 billion for 2025, an increase of approximately $30 billion year-over-year.

Meta's Superintelligence Labs team comprises a lineup of names previously seen with OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple and Google. Meta hired Ruoming Pang, former head of Apple’s AI models team, to join the team with a compensation package reportedly worth more than $200 million. In late July, Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT and former lead scientist at OpenAI, joined Meta as chief scientist.