Shares of meta heading a fresh all-time high as it pushes full steam ahead on its AI talent spending spree, according to new reports.

Deer Dier Bosa digging in for today's tech tech, dear.

So they've been successful at acquiring people?

They've been pretty successful despite Sam Altman's best efforts.

And really, this is about the talent spend.

It's really becoming a new signal to investors,

a show strength where the edge comes from the people

who can build what's actually next.

And it's kind of just like CAPEX in the first few years of the race.

No one wants to be the first to pull back because cutting comp,

it now doesn't just risk losing talent,

but it risks signaling to the market that you're losing momentum.

Meta poaching now eight, as far as we know, top researchers from Open AI. Let's assume based on reports, eight packages

at $100 million each. That's nearly a billion dollars in comp, plus more than 14 billion for

scale AIs, Alexander Wang, undisclosed amounts for Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and reportedly

a fresh

wave of offers still outstanding. Add in enormous CAPEX numbers, and we have far surpassed

Metaverse levels of spending. Meta told investors that it's expecting 2025 expenses to be in the

range of $114 to $119 billion. That's up from about $70 billion in 2021. That was peak Metaverse

hype levels. And it was also just before investors lost patience and punished share some 65%

the next year in 2022. Now Zuckerberg, of course, he is betting that this time is different,

that his years-long push for efficiency and other parts of the business gives him leeway to go on another spending spree, this time in AI, which is, of course, a more attractive, a more sustainable bet to investors. So far that is working. Shares are at all-time highs this morning, and he has successfully rattled his biggest rival in the space, despite Sam Altman's best efforts to publicly downplay these efforts to recruit and call Zuckerberg's approach a side quest.

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