‘Money can't sway me from Elon': Tesla engineer's blunt reply to Meta poaching email
Jun 24, 2025 09:16 PM IST
A senior Tesla AI engineer has sparked buzz on social media after publicly sharing a screenshot of a recruitment email from Meta and shared his sharp response turning it down. Yun-Ta Tsai, a senior engineer at Tesla AI, posted a screenshot of an email on X, purportedly showing Meta approaching him to join their AI team.(Reuters, Representational)
Yun-Ta Tsai, a senior engineer at Tesla AI, posted a screenshot of an email on X, purportedly showing Meta approaching him to join their AI team. The recruiter's message revealed that this was a 'final attempt' to connect, stating that the tech giant wanted engineering leaders like Tsai.
'I wanted to reach out one last time as I am sure you get many of these messages and wanted to make sure this one didn't get lost in the shuffle. I do really think you would find some of our new endeavours to be quite interesting. We need engineering leaders such as yourself to really make the dreams of the future a reality. Do you have a couple of minutes to tell you a bit more?," the Meta recruiter wrote. 'Making money without sense'
Tsai replied to the email in his X post. 'Sorry, we are busy at launching Robotaxi and our devotion to the sustainable abundance,' he wrote.
When asked why he was unwilling to take up the offer, Tsai said that he was not even slightly tempted. "No amount of money can sway me away from Elon. That's once-in-a-lifetime (probably history) opportunities. I enjoy tough environments. Making money without a sense of purpose would drive me crazy," he said.
A report by the Wall Street Journal stated that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been reaching out to top AI engineers and researchers, offering pay packages as high as $100 million, to convince them to join a team to build his Superintelligence lab. Reports have claimed that the tech titan has reached out to talent at OpenAI and even tried to buy other AI startups.
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