The temperature in Silicon Valley is on the higher side as the tech giants are in a talent war. It all started with Mark Zuckerberg when he started poaching
aggressively from companies like OpenAI and other firms, even the big players like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, from the valley. To which, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also criticised Zuckerberg for. Zuckerberg told the investors, 'We are trying to build an elite, talent-dense team. If you are going to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on computers 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. There's just an absolute premium for the best and most talented people.' At the time of their earnings call last week, Meta has already said that their capital expenditure will go up to $72 billion for 2025, which is a hike of around $30 billion year over year.
Elon Musk vs Meta
Now, the statement of Tesla CEO has stirred up the whole scene as he has clearly said that multiple Meta engineers have joined his xAI, and Musk is not even paying them exorbitant amounts to do so. Elon said, 'Many strong Meta engineers have and are joining xAI without the need for insane initial compensation (still great but not unsustainably high). Also, xAI has more market cap growth potential than Meta, and we are hyper merit-based: do something great and your comp can shift substantially higher.'
This comes out more as a warning for Meta, as poaching employees from other organisations means that Meta employees will get poached too. And all the tech giants are indulging in cut-throat competition to win the AI race.
