xAI is hiring top engineers from Meta without providing "insane" initial compensation, Elon Musk claimed.
He said that xAI has “vastly more market cap growth potential than Meta."
This comes at a time when Meta has been making headlines for its aggressive hiring spree in the AI space.
The race for top AI talent is heating up, and Elon Musk has made a surprising claim. According to Musk, his artificial intelligence company xAI is successfully hiring top engineers from Meta without providing “insane” initial compensation. In a recent post on X (formerly Twitter), Musk responded to reports that Meta had tried to poach over 100 employees from OpenAI. Out of those, at least ten are said to have accepted offers.
SurveySharing his thoughts, Musk posted, “Many strong Meta engineers have and are joining xAI and without the need for insane initial comp (still great, but not unsustainably high).” He added that xAI has “vastly more market cap growth potential than Meta,” and stressed that the company follows a “hyper merit-based” system. In Musk’s words, “Do something great and your comp can shift substantially higher.”
Also read: Apple Q3 earnings 2025: Record iPhone 16 sales, AI investments and more
This comes at a time when Meta has been making headlines for its aggressive hiring spree in the AI space. The company is reportedly offering massive pay packages, ranging from $200 million to $1 billion over multiple years, in an attempt to expand its Superintelligence Lab.
Recently, some of these offers were reportedly made to members of Thinking Machines Lab, a startup founded by a former OpenAI executive. But according to reports, even billion-dollar offers weren’t enough to convince those engineers to leave.
Also read: Meta strengthens its superintelligence team with another Apple researcher
Meanwhile, Meta has also been busy luring talent from other tech giants. Bowen Zhang, a key multimodal AI researcher, has reportedly joined Meta from Apple. Before him, three researchers from the same Apple team also made the switch, including Ruoming Pang, who led the iPhone maker’s AFM team.
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Ayushi Jain
Tech news writer by day, BGMI player by night. Combining my passion for tech and gaming to bring you the latest in both worlds. View Full Profile
