How many people would turn down a $1.5bn (£1.3bn) job offer from Mark Zuckerberg? Andrew Tulloch did. The Australian maths whizz and AI savant was reputedly (and we’ll get to that…) offered a dizzying sum to leave Thinking Machines Lab, the AI start-up he co-founded in February with Mira Murati, a former leading light at ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and rejoin his former employer, Meta.
So the story goes, Zuckerberg had offered to buy their company, only to be rebuffed. The Wall Street Journal – which is a pretty reliable source on business matters – reports that Zuckerberg responded by launching a talent raid on the business: because if you can’t buy a company outright, why not make the staff work for you instead?
Tech is the ultimate people business, heavily reliant on the genius of its coders. Even if it costs more than a billion for the right hire, at least no one else in the industry can have him/her.
Except it didn’t work. Tulloch didn’t bite, even for a package worth more than a billion. Nor did any of the other senior bods at Thinking Machines, which raised $2bn of funding in July on a valuation of $12bn.
Now, it should be said that Meta spokesperson Andy Stone has sniffily called the report of Tulloch’s job offer as “inaccurate and ridiculous”, while also dismissing the idea that Meta ever had an interest in buying Thinking Machines in the first place. The $1.5bn over six years, or whatever it was, would also have been heavily dependent on Meta’s stock price going stratospheric. So it wasn’t guaranteed – although a payday for Meta isn’t an unreasonable expectation, given the love AI is getting from investors, and the way Zuckerberg’s bet on all things AI is very obviously paying off in terms of the company’s current financial performance.
Silly-money salary packages are far from unusual in Silicon Valley, where firms compete for maths geniuses like Tulloch in the same way that NFL teams compete for quarterbacks. Tech talent, however, has a lot more choice than America’s mega-star athletes, whose earnings are limited by salary caps and long-term contracts and the NFL’s owner-friendly collective bargaining agreement, especially when they’re starting out.
In tech, that offer can mean adding another zero that you don’t really need. And when you’re still young and have already made more money than you can ever easily spend, with lots more to come, whatever you do, it’s not the salary offer that counts – it’s the business culture.
These people can afford to think differently to regular wage slaves. Many are motivated by a sense of mission. They are also often highly loyal to the industry’s leading figures.
A decade ago, Zuckerberg told a Facebook town hall about his unique hiring mantra: "I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person,” he said. "It's a pretty good test." But, in the AI era, are those would-be employees, who can afford to be pickier than ever about who they sign up for, now applying the same methodology to him and his companies?
Murati is interesting here. Already a rarity among the tech glitterati in that she’s a woman, she also has a reputation for being collaborative and thoughtful, with less of the outsized – and sometimes, unpleasant – ego that is so prevalent in the Valley.
So, once again: how many people would turn down $1.5bn? The answer is, potentially, quite a few in California, especially if the alternative is working for a small start-up with people you like and a culture you helped set up and can influence, as opposed to a corporate behemoth with a controversial history.
Yes, Meta’s culture is pretty favourable to engineers. If you’ve read Sarah Wynn-Williams's expose Careless People from her time there, you’ll see that Zuck’s favourite thing to do is to spend time with them, fixing problems, doing stuff, and geeking around. They’re the company’s gods. But it’s interesting to note that Tulloch had already experienced that culture earlier in his already mightily impressive career.
So yes, maybe money isn’t everything. Of course, it’s much easier to say that when you already have lots of it.
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