Sources: the researcher who declined Zuckerberg's offer of a $1.5B+ package over six years is Thinking Machines co-founder and ex-Meta staffer Andrew Tulloch
The loyalties and larger-than-life figures prompting some people to turn down insanely lucrative offers in Silicon Valley right now
Wall Street Journal
Context & Ripple Effects
Meta’s superintelligence-lab buildout had already been marked by repeated high-value approaches to outside researchers, including offers of up to $300M over four years and outreach beyond conventional hiring channels. It had also explored a route to Thinking Machines Lab through preliminary acquisition discussions, though those talks did not reach a formal offer.
Tulloch’s reported refusal matters because he is both a former Meta employee and a co-founder of the targeted lab: it tests whether an incumbent’s compensation and compute advantages can reliably dislodge the people building rival frontier teams.
First-order effects
Thinking Machines retains a co-founder rather than losing him immediately to Meta, while Meta’s recruitment campaign fails to secure a particularly relevant candidate despite an unusually large reported package.
The episode makes personal allegiance and the opportunity to build an independent lab visible constraints on Meta’s cash-led hiring strategy.
Second-order effects
Meta and other large AI employers may need to pair compensation with greater research autonomy, compute access, or team-level recruitment to win senior researchers from startup labs.
For Thinking Machines, the refusal strengthens the signal that a standalone team can retain key leadership even amid aggressive incumbent recruiting; that can improve its negotiating position with prospective partners and hires.
Third-order effects
If similar refusals persist, frontier AI competition will not be determined by compensation alone: independent labs with cohesive founding teams can remain meaningful competitors despite Big Tech’s resource advantage.
The broader pattern still favors concentration where incumbents can combine capital, compute, and recruiting; the question is whether founder-led labs can preserve enough autonomy to counter that pull.
The trend: This is one data point in the contest between Big Tech’s resource-backed consolidation of frontier AI talent and startup labs’ ability to retain founding researchers through mission, autonomy, and team cohesion.
META can't buy AI love. — Mark Zuckerberg offered to acquire Thinking Machines Lab, and afterwards tried to recruit its employees, including Andrew Tulloch. — Zuckerberg offered Tulloch a package potentially worth $1.5 billion, but Tulloch declined, and none of the company's …
Did some deeper research.... Turns out he owns 3.75% of @thinkymachines so he'll be worth $3 billion in a year anyways with their Series B round Zucc's offer was stock & performance based so didn't even come close to the money he'd leave on the table at TML lol.. lmao even
super cool! inspiring and a great reminder that most of the top AI researchers are not, in fact, on twitter. most do not tweet, many do not have accounts the loudest people on here, the ones who post the most about AI, are typically just random anonymous tech bros
This account that was just created looks to be an impersonation of the real Andrew Tulloch (guy that turned down the $1.5b Meta offer) and is shilling Shit Coins. Real account @ajtulloch seems to be locked down, created in 2012. Let's follow along and see how far fake Andy can [i…
Andrew Tulloch - the man at Thinky who turned down Zuck's $1.5B offer, had been at Meta for 11 years. Just like when Google lost Noam Shazeer, and had to pay $2.7B to get him back. Always know who your MVP is, and treat them right. Or pay 100X later, and still hear “hell no.”
What is being missed in the discussion: Tulloch is one of the five thinky co-founders from OpenAI. Meta is not just paying >1B for individual researchers but slices of AI labs.
@Yuchenj_UW He's a co-founder at TML. Tulloch is likely sitting on >5% of Thinking Machines cap table and at $12bn valuation in last round it would mean walking away from $600m with 20x upside. People thinking he's turned down $1.5bn for a $5m paycheck are just wrong.
Zuckerberg is finding it hard to hire from competitors. It seems that company culture, both good (the competitors') and bad (possibly, Meta's), still matters a lot. Same for the sense of mission that people have in some of these places. [image]
everything happens on X thank you for reading, subscribe to model behavior, the number one hate read for the most powerful people in big tech: https://www.wired.com/... [image]