Meta Offers Up To 300 Million To AI Talent

Meta Platforms, under the leadership of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has embarked on an aggressive hiring spree to build an AI superteam, offering compensation packages that have stunned the tech industry. In 2025, Meta's efforts to attract top AI talent have seen the company extend offers that rival the pay of professional athletes and Fortune 500 CEOs, including Zuckerberg himself.

Zuckerberg is reportedly maintaining a list of AI all-stars he is targeting for Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs, which aims to consolidate the company’s foundational AI research and product development. The goal is to build advanced AI reasoning models and agents that can compete at the highest level. The list includes top engineers and researchers with the rarest, most valuable skills in the tech hiring market: those with expertise in artificial intelligence. Meta’s aggressive recruitment is driven by the need to catch up with rivals such as OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek, especially after the tepid reception of Meta’s Llama 4 AI model.

Top-tier AI researchers at Meta are reportedly being offered total compensation packages of up to $300 million over four years, with some initial year earnings exceeding $100 million. These deals typically include a mix of base salary, stock grants (often vesting immediately), and substantial signing bonuses. A recent report on an eye-popping compensation package turning heads is a $200 million deal, stretching over several years, for former Apple executive Ruoming Pang, who is joining Meta’s “Superintelligence team.” For context, the highest-paid research engineers at Meta can earn up to $440,000 in base salary, while software engineers can reach $480,000. These figures exclude stock options and bonuses, which can double or triple the total package. Research scientist compensation at Meta ranges from $305,000 per year for mid-level roles to $581,000 for senior positions, with median annual pay around $400,000.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has confirmed the aggressive offers, saying on the “Uncapped” podcast: “They (Meta) started making giant offers to a lot of people on our team, you know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that (in) compensation per year.” Other reports push back on the notion that these offers include signing bonuses, while still saying that quite a lot of money is being offered to researchers with AI expertise.

Meta’s high-profile hires include Ruoming Pang, formerly Apple’s head of foundation models, who was lured to Meta with a pay package reportedly exceeding $200 million. Pang led Apple’s AI team responsible for developing large language models powering Apple Intelligence and other features. His move marks a significant blow to Apple and underscores Meta’s willingness to pay “tens of millions of dollars per year” for elite talent. Another key hire is Aleksandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, who was recruited to serve as Meta’s chief AI officer. His hiring was part of a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, and he now co-leads Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs. Nat Friedman, the ex-CEO of GitHub, joined Meta to help lead the Superintelligence Labs alongside Wang. He and Daniel Gross most recently led a venture capital fund, NFDG, that backed a number of prominent AI companies, most notably former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, as well as Perplexity. In addition to running NFDG with Friedman, Gross served as CEO of Safe Superintelligence, and was also brought on board to strengthen Meta’s AI leadership.

Meta’s massive bet on AI talent is reshaping the landscape of tech compensation and intensifying the global race for artificial intelligence supremacy. The offers are so lucrative that they have prompted OpenAI’s leadership to recalibrate their own compensation strategies and express concern over the impact on company culture. Zuckerberg’s personal involvement in the recruitment process has been widely reported. He has been directly reaching out to top AI talent, hosting potential hires, and making offers that have blindsided competitors.

All of these compensation packages far exceed Zuckerberg’s own base salary, which is a symbolic $1, and Zuckerberg does not receive bonus compensation or stock awards. His perks include a pre-tax allowance for personal security, which came to $14 million in 2024, personal use of private aircraft, which came to roughly $2.6 million in 2024, and his massive horde of Facebook stock, which puts him at number two on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with a net worth of $256 billion. As of 2024, Zuckerberg stood to make $700 million per year alone.