Angry at Mira Murati for refusing Meta's $1 Billion Job Offer; CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched a full-scale …
tried to buy
OpenAI
's former Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Mira Murati
startup,
Thinking Machines Lab
. But as she declined to sell her company despite a $1 billion offer, CEO
Mark Zuckerberg
'responded by launching a full-scale raid,' reports the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Zuckerberg, the report says, approached more than a dozen of Thinking Machines' 50 employees in the following weeks 'to sound them out about jumping ship'. According to the publication, one of his main targets was
Andrew Tulloch
, a leading researcher and co-founder of the startup.
When Mark Zuckerberg offered $1.5 billion pay package to Andrew Tulloch
In order to lure Tulloch, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg offered a pay package that could reach $1.5 billion over six years, depending on bonuses and Meta's stock performance. However, Tulloch also turned down the offer.
Meta has been trying to recruit employees from OpenAI and startups founded by its former employees, like Murati's Thinking Machines and Dario Amodei's Anthropic. Meta has reached out to more than 100 OpenAI employees and hired at least 10.
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The report quotes Meta spokesperson Andy Stone who called the offer 'inaccurate and ridiculous.' He said that compensation packages depend on stock price performance and added that Meta is not trying to buy Thinking Machines.
Who is Andrew Tulloch
Andrew Tulloch started his academic journey at the University of Sydney. He graduated with first-class honours and received a University Medal in mathematics. Tulloch then completed a Master's degree in Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge and pursued a PhD at UC Berkeley.
As per his LinkedIn profile, Tulloch worked at Meta from 2012 to 2023. He was involved in building machine learning systems and helped develop PyTorch, a tool that became widely used in AI research and development. His work had a major influence on Meta's AI infrastructure. Meta's Alexandr Wang, who now leads its superintelligence lab, also tried to persuade Tulloch to join Meta.
In 2016, OpenAI's Greg Brockman had tried to hire Tulloch but could not match his Facebook salary. Tulloch eventually joined OpenAI seven years later in 2023 when ChatGPT had already become widely popular. At OpenAI, he worked on GPT-4's pretraining and reasoning models. In early 2025, he co-founded Thinking Machines Lab.
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