Meta’s (META) recent hiring of Ruoming Pang, the former head of Apple’s (AAPL) foundational AI models team, has drawn major attention. And not just for the high-profile poach, but for the size of Pang’s pay package. According to Bloomberg, the tech giant offered Pang more than $200 million over several years to make it one of the largest compensation deals in the current AI talent war. The offer reportedly includes a high base salary, a generous signing bonus, and a large portion of stock tied to performance targets. This means that Pang will only receive the full payout if Meta’s stock performs well and he remains with the company for the long run.
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This extraordinary offer shows just how aggressive Meta has become when it comes to building out its Superintelligence Labs. Indeed, Pang joins other high-profile recruits, such as Nat Friedman, Alexandr Wang, and Daniel Gross, as Meta tries to become the leader of the AI space. While Apple has a lot of resources, it chose not to match the deal because the size of Pang’s package would have surpassed the pay of Apple CEO Tim Cook, which made it difficult to justify internally. As a result, Apple has since named Zhifeng Chen as the new head of its Foundation Models team.
Unsurprisingly, the hiring battle has also created a public back-and-forth between tech leaders. Indeed, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth recently pushed back against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s claims that researchers were being offered up to $100 million to leave by calling it an exaggeration. Still, Pang’s $200 million package suggests otherwise. In addition, Bloomberg stated that more engineers from Apple’s AI team may be considering offers from Meta, raising the stakes even higher. With companies competing fiercely for specialized AI talent, it’s likely that compensation wars like this are just getting started.
Is Meta a Buy, Sell, or Hold?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on META stock based on 42 Buys, four Holds, and zero Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. Furthermore, the average META price target of $735.28 per share implies that shares are near fair value.
