A new escalation in the feud between Elon Musk and Open AI now spilling into the AI talent wars.

For that, we'll turn to McKenzie Segalos in today's tech check. Morning, Mac.

Hey, good morning, Carl. So opening I just pulled off a quiet power move,

poaching the former finance chief of Elon Musk's rival startup XAI.

Mike Libertore, who left XAI after just a few months on the job,

starts this morning as OpenAI's new business finance officer for AI infrastructure.

He'll report to CFO Sarah Fryer and oversee the company's massive cap-beck spend,

including contracts like that $300 billion deal with Oracle.

Now, his exit was one of several high-profile

departures that have thinned out Elon Musk's leadership bench. This summer alone, XAI lost its

general counsel, a senior attorney and co-founder Igor Babushkin, who's an alum of both OpenAI and

Google DeepMind. So this new Open AI hire really tells us two big things.

It marks another salvo and that long-running rivalry

between Musk and Sam Altman,

but it also underscores the newer front

and the AI boom, a full-blown talent war.

In today's arms race, attracting, poaching,

and retaining the best minds is becoming as

valuable as the Nvidia chips that power the models that they build. Now, for startups and the

big tech giants alike, the ability to hire top engineers and researchers is the differentiator.

Now, some of these deep-pocketed players, Open AI, Anthropic, Google, and meta, they are dangling NBA-style pay packages and bonuses in the range of tens of millions of dollars to secure scarce expertise.

That competition keeps driving compensation higher, and it comes as these companies are already shelling out hundreds of billions of dollars for

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