Mark Zuckerberg has been turned down by a tech worker after he offered them a $1bn (£750m) deal to join Meta's artificial intelligence (AI) unit.
As the battle for top talent in Silicon Valley intensifies, the social media mogul has offered multi-million dollar packages to several researchers at San Francisco-based AI start-up Thinking Machines.
The company has no public-facing product but saw its valuation rise by $2 billion last month, taking it to £12 billion overall.
Some members of the team were offered between £200m and £500m over a four-year period, while one researcher was reportedly offered a package worth as much as $1bn to join the tech giant.
According to a report by Wired, most offers included an award worth between $50m and $100m in the first year alone.
Despite the eye-watering sums, no one at the start-up has accepted Meta’s offer so far.
Meta confirmed it had made a "handful" of offers to Thinking Machines staff, but disputed the reported figures.
A spokesperson told The Telegraph: "We made offers only to a handful of people at Thinking Machines and while there was one sizeable offer, the details are off."
Mira Murati, 36, founded Thinking Machines and has gone on to become one of the most powerful women in tech.
The latest offers are part of a wider push by tech giants to secure the world’s leading AI scientists and engineers in order to gain the upper hand over rivals.
Meta’s recruitment drive has reportedly been led personally by Mr Zuckerberg, who is keen to lure scientists and developers to a new lab focused on building highly advanced AI tools.
The tech boss is spending tens of billions of dollars on the creation of these tools, which he claims could soon transform the global economy and society at large.
As part of the push, OpenAI’s chief executive recently revealed that some of his employees had been offered deals worth as much as $100m by Meta.
Several other top researchers have also received generous offers directly from Mr Zuckerberg via personalised WhatsApp messages.
Around 50 leading researchers and experts have already been recruited to his new “superintelligence” lab, after he reportedly grew frustrated with the lack of progress by Meta’s existing engineering teams.
The Meta boss has also reportedly orchestrated a $14.3 billion deal for the founder of AI firm Scale AI, Alexandr Wang, to lead the new team.
