Elon Musk Does Reverse Poaching From Mark Zuckerberg’s AI Team: ‘xAI Has More Potential Than Meta’

The Silicon Valley’s race to achieve AGI in the post-ChatGPT era is driving a hiring war among top tech companies. Meta’s Mark Zuckberg’s ruthless poaching of top talents from OpenAI and other firms for Meta Superintellence Labs created paranoia earlier, only for the Sam Altman-company to later Reverse Uno by poaching back some of Meta’s AI talent. There’s top dollar on the table along with the allurement of offering infinite GPU prowess for R&D. Amid all the cacophony, reacting to the brutal talent acquisition crusade amid the AI firms, Elon Musk chimed in. The xAI boss nonchalantly stated

Many strong Meta engineers have and are joining xAI and without the need for insane initial comp (still great, but not unsustainably high).”

He pitted xAI as better than Mark Zuckerberg’s company in terms of market capitalization.

Also, xAI has vastly more market cap growth potential than Meta.”

Musk further added,

And we are hyper merit-based: do something great and your comp can shift substantially higher.”

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…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2025

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For the unversed, Elon Musk founded xAI in March 2023. xAI recruited Google DeepMind’s top talent, Igor Babuschkin, as the Chief Engineer for his new AI team. The firm launched its first AI chatbot, Grok, in November 2023, as a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Shortly after launching Grok 4, Musk announced that the United States Department of Defense has made a $200 million contract with the firm dubbed “Grok for Government.”

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Cover: Patrick Gawande / Mashable India