Meta Offered Over $200 Million to Poach Apple’s Top AI Exec: Report

Meta is pulling no punches in its ongoing AI talent war, with a new report revealing that the company offered a massive pay package worth over $200 million to lure a top engineer away from Apple.

According to Bloomberg, Meta recruited Ruoming Pang, who previously led Apple’s AI models team, with a compensation package totaling more than $200 million, including base salary, a signing bonus, and, most notably, Meta stock. Most of the package is tied to stock performance and long-term loyalty, per sources, meaning Pang’s total payout will depend on Meta’s market value and his tenure at the company.

This eye-popping figure highlights the stakes in Meta’s “superintelligence” push — a bold effort to build AI systems capable of matching or surpassing human-level performance. The social media giant’s superintelligence team, dubbed Meta Superintelligence Labs (or MSL), is already home to former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, AI startup founder Daniel Gross, and Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, who now serves as Meta’s chief AI officer after Meta took a 49% stake in Scale worth $14.3 billion.

Apple reportedly didn’t attempt to match Meta’s offer for Pang, marking another high-profile departure from the Cupertino-based tech giant. Just earlier this week, Apple announced that its longtime Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Williams, would retire later this year — raising further questions about leadership stability at the company.

Meta’s aggressive hiring spree has also rattled other AI heavyweights. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently revealed that Meta has offered some of his staff signing bonuses of up to $100 million. Despite his claims of a better culture at OpenAI, Meta has already poached more than 10 researchers from the company, along with top talent from Anthropic, Google, and various AI startups.

As the AI arms race accelerates, Meta’s sky-high compensation offers show just how far it’s willing to go to dominate the next wave of artificial intelligence.