$100 million for an AI genius? It’s a bargain, says former Google HR boss Laszlo Bock.

Meta is reportedly trying to poach AI geniuses with $100 million offers. According to Google’s former VP of HR, it may be a “bargain.”

Laszlo Bock, who spent a decade at Google from 2006, told Business Insider it was rational because of the return on the investment Meta could get, and because of the potential harm denying talent could do to rivals.

“I think it’s actually very rational for Meta to be offering this,” Bock said.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said last month that Meta was offering his researchers up to $100 million in what’s morphed into an all-out AI talent war. Altman called them “crazy.” Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told CNBC that Altman “neglected to mention that he’s countering those offers.”

Meta’s recent big-name hires include former GitHub chief Nat Friedman and former OpenAI researchers Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren. The company did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Bock, who has founded several startups since leaving Google, said spending big on individuals is often cheaper than “acquihires” or other agreements that Big Tech has increasingly been turning to.

He also said that tech companies often face winner-takes-all markets, making it more crucial for them to do everything they can to get ahead.

Last month, Meta paid $14.3 billion to take a 49% stake in Scale AI and bring in Alexandr Wang, the AI training company’s CEO and cofounder, into Meta. In 2024, Google rehired Character.AI founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas as part of a licensing deal reportedly worth $2.7 billion.

“Strategically, not only is it rational, it’s cheaper than the deals that have been done with Character AI or Scale AI,” Bock told BI. “If you can pick off the individuals for $100 million each and they’re good, it’s actually a bargain.”

He added that nine-figure packages are also a “rounding error” for the largest tech companies. Meta reported $164.5 billion in revenue last year.

Culture bomb

The tech industry’s compensation packages have grown, but its high-stakes poaching tactics are not new. Bock said that when he was at Google, they had processes to get a “multimillion-dollar counter-offer” in the hands of employees within “60 minutes” of them saying they had an offer from a rival.

There could also be an element of “game theory” at play with counter-offers, Bock said.

Google would counter-offer to force the poaching company to raise its offer, Bock said, with the goal of sending those employees to rivals with bigger salaries to throw off team dynamics and disrupt the other company’s culture.

If a “mediocre” person joined a competitor earning much more than their new colleagues, it could cause “tremendous internal tension,” Bock added.

“Done correctly, there’s a lot of actual strategy behind it and it’s super fun,” he added.

Google declined a request for comment from BI.

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