Can Zuckerberg Buy AI Talent?

More Than LeBron

The market for elite AI talent has officially detached from the normal laws of corporate physics. Consider this: LeBron James, arguably the basketball GOAT, will earn roughly half a billion dollars in on-court salary over his entire NBA career. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly offered a single AI researcher, Andrew Tulloch, a compensation package worth three times that—as much as $1.5 billion—to leave a startup.

Tulloch said no.

But while Tulloch's rejection captured the headlines, Zuckerberg's checkbook has not been entirely without effect. Last month, Meta successfully poached Ruoming Pang, Apple's top executive for AI models, with a package worth more than $200 million. In recent weeks, Meta has also picked off key researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic. Zuckerberg's money is working, at least some of the time. This raises a more interesting question: In a battle between mission and money, what kind of team is Zuckerberg actually building, and will it even work?

Even in Silicon Valley, where star engineers have long wielded outsize economic power, this is a notable development. As the battle for AI talent escalates, companies with the biggest war chests are finding the cash cannon only gets them so far. The Wall Street Journal detailed Zuckerberg's aggressive recruiting blitz:

While some AI researchers act like free agents, bouncing between labs in pursuit of more pay and power, quite a few display an unwavering allegiance to their chosen leaders, larger-than-life figures who, in the tech industry, carry the single-name cachet of rock stars. The idiosyncratic cultures of the different startups bind employees to one another.

This is a frustrating situation for Meta. With its own AI models lagging, Zuckerberg has adopted an aggressive, checkbook-first strategy. But the leaders of the top AI labs have built powerful, non-financial defenses that are proving remarkably effective against his advances.

One way to think about it is that these startups have developed cultural moats that are surprisingly resistant to capital:

• A Quasi-Religious Mission: OpenAI, from its inception, framed its work not as a business venture but as a quest to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity. Researchers who have turned down Meta's offers have reportedly cited a belief that OpenAI is closest to achieving this grand goal.
• Charismatic Leadership: Startups like Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab are built around the intense loyalty their founders command. Murati, known for her emotional intelligence, has inspired a "band of apostles" who followed her from OpenAI.
• Shared Ideology: The founding team of Anthropic, a company that has proven highly resistant to poaching, is bound by a shared history in the "effective altruism" movement, a philosophical alignment that transcends a typical employer-employee relationship.

Even when Zuckerberg's financial offers do succeed, the strategy carries its own risks. Simply assembling a group of highly paid superstars does not guarantee a cohesive and productive team. As one senior figure at a rival lab noted, "You can collect a team of all-stars but that doesn’t mean it is an all-star team." The aggressive poaching has also reportedly unsettled some of Meta's existing AI staff, who fear being sidelined.

The entire episode highlights a fundamental tension in the AI race. For a capital-intensive industry where startups must raise billions just to get a seat at the table, it is a strange turn of events when money proves not to be the most powerful weapon. Meta possesses near-limitless financial resources and is succeeding in acquiring brilliant individuals. But the startups it's trying to raid have cultivated assets that are proving harder to buy: a sense of mission, deep-seated loyalty, and a powerful, shared culture. In the battle for the future of intelligence, it turns out having the deepest pockets isn't everything.

Apple Opens Its Wallet

For more than a decade, Apple’s playbook has been a model of consistency: patient internal development, small, surgical acquisitions, and fierce fiscal discipline. This week, CEO Tim Cook signaled he might be ready to throw that playbook out the window. On an earnings call, Cook sent a clear message that the famously frugal tech giant is prepared to open its wallet to catch up in artificial intelligence, stating Apple would "substantially" increase spending on data centers and was "very open" to a large acquisition. This is, for Apple, a dramatic departure from the strategy that made it the world's most valuable company.

The comments represent a rare, public acknowledgment of a growing crisis inside Cupertino. For the first time in the modern smartphone era, Apple is not just late to a major technology shift, it is significantly behind. The company is now facing a perfect storm of threats: its own AI products are delayed, a foundational $20 billion-a-year revenue stream is at risk, and a new wave of AI startups is threatening to make its core products obsolete. Cook's newfound willingness to spend is a clear signal that the company's patient, wait-and-perfect playbook is no longer enough.

One way to think about it is that Apple is facing three distinct problems at once:

1. The Technology Gap: While rivals like Microsoft and Google are on track to spend over $100 billion and $85 billion respectively on AI data centers, Apple has been forced to delay its much-hyped Siri overhaul until 2026. Its reliance on a partnership with OpenAI for some features is a plain admission of its internal shortcomings.
2. The Regulatory Threat: The US Department of Justice is targeting the lucrative deal where Google pays Apple an estimated $20 billion a year to be the default search engine in Safari. If a court unwinds that agreement, a massive, high-margin revenue stream could simply vanish.
3. The Startup Disruption: AI-powered "answer engines" like Perplexity are fundamentally challenging the traditional search model that underpins the Google deal. As Apple's own executives admitted in court, users are already starting to turn to AI instead of search, threatening to disrupt the primary gateway to information on over 2 billion Apple devices.

Cook’s comments signal a strategic pivot driven by this necessity. The "build it in-house" philosophy that defined the iPhone era is proving too slow for the blistering pace of AI. An acquisition offers a shortcut. Buying a company like Perplexity, which has reportedly been discussed internally, would instantly provide Apple with a world-class AI team and a "Plan B" should its Google deal be voided.

The scale of this potential shift cannot be overstated. Apple's largest-ever acquisition was its $3 billion purchase of Beats in 2014. A leading AI startup like Perplexity, recently valued privately at $14 billion, would likely cost far more, shattering Apple's M&A records and signaling a completely new approach to growth. But even with a blank check, Apple's path is not simple. A large acquisition would attract intense regulatory scrutiny, and successfully integrating a fast-moving AI startup into its rigid corporate structure would be an immense challenge. The central question for Apple is whether its newfound urgency—and willingness to spend—is coming too late, or just in time.

The Scoreboard

• AI: Anthropic Revokes OpenAI's Access to Claude (WIRED)
• Infrastructure: Meta to share AI infrastructure costs via $2 billion asset sale (Reuters)
• Consumer: Nintendo hiking price of original Switch for U.S. customers (CNBC)
• E-commerce: Alibaba, Meituan, JD.com commit to truce after regulator calls for ‘rational’ competition (SCMP)