professorkamrankhan@gmail.com 
Meta’s poaching of a top Apple Intelligence executive has been a costly exercise, with the social giant doling out $200 million for the worker.
On Monday, reports surfaced about the head of Apple’s foundational models team, Ruoming Pang, being poached by Meta. While at the time it was thought that the pay package was worth tens of millions of dollars per year, the total compensation seems to have extended to nine figures.
According to Bloomberg, Pang will be paid more than $200 million across several years, conditions permitting. Despite its massive size, the package is allegedly in line with other major hires for Meta’s Superintelligence Labs team.
Others on the MSL team include former GitHub head Nat Friedman, Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang, and AI startup founder Daniel Gross.
Target-led
The compensation package is divided up into smaller elements. This includes a base salary and a signing bonus, which are thought to be high to counter situations where an employee had to walk away from significant startup equity.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described in June his battle with Meta over employees, claiming that signing bonus offers were as high as $100 million in some cases.
Stock will be the largest segment of the package, with payouts based on specific targets, such as Meta’s stock growing by a specific percentage in a year. The stock they receive will also be vested for longer than the typical four-year schedule typically offered to employees.
Cash-heavy temptation
The poaching of Pang from Apple is only part of Meta’s campaign to pull as much high-level talent as possible into its teams. The sheer sums at play, in a potentially lucrative segment in the tech industry, make it hard for anyone else to compete.
While Apple famously has a massive amount of resources on hand, it apparently didn’t attempt to match the offer. One of the reasons was supposedly because Pang’s alleged compensation package was too great, in excess of what other executives at Apple would receive, including CEO Tim Cook.
It’s not just a big package in the tech industry. It is believed that the MSL team’s compensation is among the highest of any corporate job. Even when compared with CEOs at major banks.
For Apple, its failure to hold on to Pang may hurt its Foundation Model team. To compensate for the loss, the team is now being run by Zhifeng Chen, with new managers including Chong Wang, Zirui Wang, Ching-Cheng Chui, and Guoli Yin.
The brain drain may continue, however, as Meta is just as well-heeled as Apple and other tech giants rushing into the AI space. Apple will almost certainly face more employees being tempted over to Mark Zuckerberg’s operation with massive sacks of cash.
It hasn’t yet decided to take on Meta in a head-to-head employee money fight. But, with companies persistently hungry for specialized AI talent, Apple may be forced into doing so in the future.
