Elon Stole 18 of Zuckerberg's BEST AI Engineers

9 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube video titled "Elon Stole 18 of Zuckerberg's BEST AI Engineers" (uploaded Sept 9, 2025). The excerpt is a single-speaker commentary (labeled SPEAKER A) in which the narrator discusses Elon Musk recruiting top AI engineers from Meta to xAI, contrasts Mark Zuckerberg's heavy cash retention offers with xAI equity/vision and long-term upside, and praises Musk as a visionary drawing engineers from SpaceX and Tesla to build the so-called Colossus factory. The piece focuses on recruitment, compensation structure (initial comp vs. long-term equity), mission-driven culture, and market-cap growth potential.

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Elon Musk just stole 18 of Mark Zuckerberg's best AI engineers. So Zuck has offered his engineers $250 million each to stay at Meta, but Elon gave them something money couldn't buy and they abandoned Meta. What do you think that was that Elon gave them that Mark couldn't? Shares in xAI at a really good valuation because Facebook is already worth a lot. So he said many strong Meta engineers have and are joining xAI and without the need for insane initial comp. So keyword, initial comp, still great but not unsustainably high. So xAI has vastly more market cap growth potential than Meta and we are hyper merit-based. Do something great and your comp can shift substantially higher. And you've read about this on Twitter. He'll have like young kids going in. But I think he paints a very compelling mission and vision. And when he's pulling in SpaceX engineers and Tesla engineers to do whatever it takes to build the Colossus factory, you know that this is probably the best visionary founder of our time. And so sometimes it's just not about— it's not about the initial compensation. I think the money matters a lot, but I think the long-term compensation and the vision and the mission matter too. And being able to work with a generational entrepreneur, maybe the best one, is great.