The $100 million employee

AI’s talent war: From $100M poaching offers to mass layoffs—And the workers, CEOs, and industries caught in the crossfire.

Author

Malcolm Frank, CEO
June 23, 2025

The $100 million employee

Last week, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, dropped a stunner: Meta is allegedly offering his top engineers $100 million to jump ship.

No one from Meta denied it, which is wild. But here’s what’s wilder: it makes perfect sense.

The race to superintelligence - and its associated winner-takes-all economics - runs through a relatively small number of engineers.  And for Meta - with its market cap of $1.7 trillion - both the downside and upside are too great not to play to win.  

Steve Jobs once said a great engineer isn’t ten times better than an average one — they’re a hundred times better. That was back when they were just building computers and enterprise apps. Now they’re building something much bigger.

Meanwhile, in the same news cycle, Microsoft and Amazon announced layoffs in the thousands. The reason? AI.  Quite the sharp contrast.  

A chasm is opening up — between those who build AI and those whose jobs are being swallowed by it. One group is minting $100 million offers. The other is refreshing their LinkedIn page.

Is Meta trying to poach OpenAI staff with $100mn sign-on offers?

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has accused Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta of trying to poach his developers with the promise of $100mn sign-on bonuses and even higher compensation, as the social media platform races to catch up in the AI battle.

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Scale AI’s 30-year-old billionaire cofounder has a warning for anyone who craves work-life balance: “maybe you’re not in the right work”

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And one more thing…

World's first smart dog collar uses AI to track pet health, detect escape attempts nationwide for pet parents

"It’s really not just about the active dogs," French founder and CEO Jonathan Bensamoun told FOX Business. "It’s about every dog and any parent who is interested in having a more granular understanding of their dog’s health."

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