Many top engineers of Meta are joining my AI company xAI, and I am paying them ..., says CEO Elon Musk

Elon Musk has broken silence on the ongoing talent war in Silicon Valley. The unprecedented

AI talent war

is said to have been started by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for the company's of its

Superintelligence Labs

. And almost all technology companies -- big and small -- are reportedly impacted by it. Be it Apple, Google, Microsoft or not-so-known companies (till a few months ago) like Windsurf and others. Responding to all the buzz on Meta giving million-dollar joining bonuses, Zuckerberg told investors: “We’re building an elite, talent-dense team. If you’re going to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on computer and building out multiple gigawatt 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.” He added, “There’s just an absolute premium for the best and most talented people.” During the earnings call last week, the company said capital expenditures will go up to $72 billion for 2025, an increase of approximately $30 billion year-over-year.

What Elon Musk said on Meta engineers joining xAI

However, billionaire Elon Musk has claimed that many

Meta engineers

have joined his AI startup

XAI

, and unlike Meta, the company is not paying them astronomically high salaries to join. "Many strong Meta engineers have and are joining xAI and without the need for insane initial comp (still great, but not unsustainably high). Also, xAI has vastly more market cap growth potential than Meta. And we are hyper merit-based: do something great and your comp can shift substantially higher," wrote Elon Musk in a post on Twitter.

In another post on the issue, Musk gave a shout out to engineers to join xAI. "For ultra-hardcore engineers, @xAI is the place to be," he wrote.

Meta hires top execs from Apple, OpenAI and others

Meta's Superintelligence Labs team comprises a lineup of names previously seen with OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple and Google. Meta hired Ruoming Pang, former head of Apple’s AI models team, to join the team with a compensation package reportedly worth more than $200 million. In late July, Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT and former lead scientist at OpenAI, joined Meta as chief scientist. Zhao previously helped build GPT-4 and led synthetic data efforts at OpenAI. Other big hires done by Meta include former GitHub chief Nat Friedman, Scale AI's former CEO Alexandr Wang, and former OpenAI researchers Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren.

'Failure' of Llama 4 model

Zuckerberg is reported to have intensified Silicon Valley's talent war through aggressive hiring and startup deals after the poor performance of the Facebook parent's Llama 4 model. He is said to be unhappy with the in-house team as Meta tries to catch up with rivals such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. According to a Business Insider report, quoting sources, Mark Zuckerberg has been emailing prospects directly and even hosting AI researchers at his home.