Mira Murati Said No To Mark Zuckerberg Proposal, Thinking Machines Founder Refused Offer

6th August 2025 at 3:55 PM

2 minutes read

New Delhi : You should never bet against Mark Zuckerberg, or so runs a popular saying in Silicon Valley. That is because Zuckerberg is considered ruthlessly determined, and he almost always has way. But recently he was thwarted and now he is reportedly angry. Recently Zucekrberg made a proposal to former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, seeking to purchase her AI company Thinking Machines Lab. But when Mira said no, Zuckerberg decided to poach her top engineer. Money on offer — $1.5 billion.

The Meta CEO reportedly launched the “full-scale raid” on a potentially rival AI startup after its founder, and former OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati refused a $1 billion acquisition offer. The recruitment drive, which can only be classified as “intense”, targeted more than a dozen employees at Murati’s startup called Thinking Machines Lab, culminating in a staggering offer to one of its most prolific engineers, Andrew Tulloch.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Tulloch, who is a renowned machine learning expert and cofounder of Thinking Machines Lab, was offered a salary cumulatively amounting to a whopping $1.5 billion over six years by Meta. It has been known for a while now that Zuckerberg has taken upon himself to hire top AI talent from across the industry for his Superintelligence dream team, personally reaching out to researchers and engineers such as Tulloch, luring them with hefty pay cheques and eye-watering bonuses.

His work was so good, even Alexandr Wang, who now leads Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, tried to persuade him to return. It would have been a homecoming of sorts. Only Tulloch was in no mood to return, having clearly found his calling elsewhere. And if Twitter chatter is to be believed, he probably also declined the meta offer because he could be holding a significant equity in Thinking Machines Labs, which has already been valued north of $30 billion.

A graduate of the University of Sydney with first-class honors and a University Medal in mathematics, Tulloch holds a Master’s from Cambridge and is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley. He worked at Meta from 2012 to 2023, and a year at OpenAI, where he contributed to the pre-training and reasoning models of GPT-4. He cofounded Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati in early 2025.

Meta’s aggressive recruitment drive is not limited to Thinking Machines Lab. The company has been actively trying to poach employees from OpenAI and other AI startups, including Dario Amodei’s Anthropic. The WSJ report notes that Meta has reached out to more than 100 OpenAI employees and successfully hired at least 10 of them. But while Tulloch refused to take the bait, others like 24-year-old Matt Deitke gave in after Zuckerberg’s persistence.