After Mira Murati's rejection, her cofounder turns down Zuckerberg's $1.5 bn offer

Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg offered Thinking Machines Lab cofounder Andrew Tulloch a $1.5-billion pay package over six years to join Meta's AI team. Tulloch, however, turned down the offer

In a high-stakes bid to dominate the artificial intelligence race, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an audacious move to acquire Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. 

Despite a reported $1 billion offer, Murati turned down the deal, triggering an aggressive recruitment campaign by Zuckerberg to lure away her top talent. 

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg did not take Murati’s refusal lightly. He is said to have personally launched a “full-scale raid” on the startup, approaching over a dozen of its 50 employees to convince them to switch sides. 

At the centre of this poaching attempt was Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of San Francisco-based Thinking Machines Lab and a celebrated figure in AI circles. In what has been described as an “intense” recruitment effort, Zuckerberg offered Tulloch a staggering compensation package reportedly worth $1.5 billion over six years — contingent on bonuses and stock performance.     

 

AI veteran turns Meta down

Tulloch, however, declined the offer. A machine learning expert, Tulloch previously worked at Meta from 2012 to 2023 and played a key role in building PyTorch, a widely used AI research framework. He also spent a year at OpenAI working on GPT-4’s training and reasoning models before co-founding Thinking Machines Lab with Murati in early 2025, The Wall Street Journal mentioned.

 

Meta denies acquisition attempt

Responding to the report, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone dismissed the $1.5 billion compensation figure as “inaccurate and ridiculous”, adding that such packages depend heavily on Meta’s stock price. Stone also denied that Meta ever tried to acquire Thinking Machines Lab.     

 

Who is Andrew Tulloch?

Andrew Tulloch graduated with first-class honours and a University Medal in mathematics from the University of Sydney, followed by a Master’s in Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge. He is currently pursuing a PhD at UC Berkeley. 

During his previous stint at Meta, Tulloch’s work left such a mark that even Alexandr Wang — now head of Meta’s Superintelligence Lab — personally tried to woo him back. Back in 2016, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman also tried to hire Tulloch but could not match his then-Facebook salary. Tulloch finally joined OpenAI in 2023 after ChatGPT went mainstream.

 

Meta’s hiring spree targets rivals

Tulloch wasn’t the only one on Meta’s radar. The company has aggressively pursued top AI minds, especially from OpenAI and startups formed by its alumni—like Dario Amodei’s Anthropic and Murati’s Thinking Machines. Meta reportedly approached more than 100 OpenAI employees and managed to hire at least 10. 

Among those who joined Meta was 24-year-old Matt Deitke. Initially declining an offer of $125 million, Deitke reportedly changed his mind after Zuckerberg personally offered to double it — raising the package to $250 million, with $100 million guaranteed in the first year alone.