The largest offer in the history of AI: Zuckerberg offered $1.25 billion to a neural network engineer to join Meta, and he refused

Meta wanted to lure the neural network engineer and offered a record-breaking sum of —$1.25 billion. But the idea of becoming a billionaire in a few years did not convince the developer.

Daniel Francis, the founder of the Abel startup and a well-known critic of large corporations, told this story. According to him, he was the one who was told about Mark Zuckerberg’s record-breaking offer of $1.25 billion.

Update: was informed of a $1.25 billion offer for four years, new highest I’ve seen

guys what the hell is going on https://t.co/n5vDZ7Dl5y

— Daniel (@growing_daniel) July 20, 2025

In a previous post, he had already hinted that Meta was hunting for a top AI engineer, offering him a billion-dollar bonus. But in the end, the corporation received an answer: «The man said no». In the comments to Francis’s tweet, someone noted that companies are now willing to pay «intellectual property-style money» — for the mere presence of brains.

Francis is well acquainted with the world of hype AI. His startup creates police reports based on body camera video and dispatcher data. In 2023, he became famous when he pretended to be a fired Twitter employee and even contacted journalists — after which he was actually hired.

As it turned out, this offer was not an isolated case. Other developers responded to the tweet by saying that they had heard of even bigger offers. And an AI researcher named Rune (probably a former OpenAI employee) said that the amount does not look so crazy if we consider the contract as a temporary acquisition of a top engineer that will enrich the company. The main thing is that later the developer was not fired and was not on the list of unfit persons.

After that, the discussion in X quickly turned into a contest of incredible amounts and strange stories about bonuses. However, some of them were confirmed. For example, in June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted that Meta had lured three employees of his company by offering them up to $100 million just for signing a contract. Spoiler: They did not receive huge bonuses. Previously, there were also cases when Zuckerbeng «recruited» Google DeepMind researchers through personal emails.

Source: Toms Hardware