Meta's 'Anti-Godfather' Offers
A month ago, as reports started to surface about not just "$100M signing bonuses" but also $300M+ total compensation offers made by Mark Zuckerberg to top AI talent to join his new 'Superintelligence Lab' at Meta, one thing immediately jumped to mind: the famous scene in The Godfather where Vito Corleone tells Johnny Fontane: "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse." The implication here, of course, is that the Don is going to make an offer so compelling – be it monetary or more likely, something far more nefarious – that the person on the other end simply cannot turn it down.
Well, the problem with the comparison was that people did keep turning down Zuck's offer. Not all of them, mind you (though seemingly almost all of them who got the actual 'Godfather' $100M+ offers – aside from one or two, perhaps), but more than seemed to be accepting them. Which was wild. And now it's even more wild. To the point where I must admit that my original attempt to brand such offers was way off the mark. These aren't 'Godfather' offers at all, they're almost the opposite. Because people keep refusing them – even as they've now apparently crossed the $1B threshold.
That sounds insane, but as first reported by Kylie Robison for Wired earlier this week, in the midst of trying to poach talent from Thinking Machine Lab (after CEO Mira Murati apparently turned down an acquisition offer), Zuck threw out a $1B+ offer to at least one person. I was wondering who it might have been, and sure enough, despite Meta PR's weak attempt at a non-denial about the whole ordeal, yesterday Berber Jin and Keach Hagey of WSJ backed up the reporting. And they apparently got the name of Zuck's would-be billion-dollar-employee:
As Mark Zuckerberg sought to play catch-up in the generative AI race, he reached out a few months ago to OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, Mira Murati, and offered to buy her fledgling startup, Thinking Machines Lab.
When she said no, the Meta chief executive responded by launching a full-scale raid. In the following weeks he approached more than a dozen of Murati’s roughly 50 employees to sound them out about jumping ship. His chief target: Andrew Tulloch, a leading researcher and co-founder at the startup.
To peel him off, Zuckerberg dangled a billion-dollar package that could, with top bonuses and extraordinary stock performance, have been worth as much as $1.5 billion over at least six years, according to people familiar with the matter.
Tulloch said no. None of his colleagues left either.
There will probably be nothing more damning ever written about Meta than the fact that there are so many people Zuck literally can't pay to join them. And not just regular amounts of money – obscene amounts of money. A billion dollars. Or more! Their PR team can call such reporting “inaccurate and ridiculous” all they want – and in my own personal experience in the past, that PR team in particular has a slippery grasp of the truth – there's way too much smoke around these offers for there to be no fire.
Clearly, Meta wants to argue semantics in to obfuscate their tactics here – i.e. that they're tied to milestones and time and whatnot; of course they are, that doesn't make them any less incredible. And I especially appreciate Meta trying to push back against such reporting while at the same time Zuck himself is out there making the case for why such offers aren't crazy. And he's not wrong!
But again, to me, the size of the offers are now even more incredible because people keep turning them down. And I think this report provides a nice, succinct outline as to why. It's some combination of believing in the mission and chance of the AI company you're currently at mixed with not wanting to go work at Meta.
Meta has reached out to more than 100 of OpenAI’s employees. It has hired at least 10. On July 25, Zuckerberg picked Shengjia Zhao, a Chinese researcher who spent three years at OpenAI, to lead Meta’s new superintelligence team.
The OpenAI researchers who have so far rebuffed Meta’s advances chose to remain because they believed OpenAI was the closest to reaching artificial general intelligence, wanted to work at a smaller company and were wary of having the fruits of their labors go toward a product that was primarily driven by advertising, according to people familiar with the matter.
But what's especially wild about Tulloch is that before Thinking Machines Lab and OpenAI, he worked at Meta. Almost a decade ago, Greg Brockman tried to pull him out of then-Facebook and nearly got him before he opted to stay. The reason then to hear Brockman tell it? Money. So not going back to Meta now with a Zuckerberg $1B+ offer seems extra damning. And points to a real potential problem.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler