The new plan targets senior leaders, including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, as the company expands its drive into artificial intelligence and tries to keep key talent.

Regulatory filings show that several top executives will now be eligible for stock options. They include the finance chief, technology chief, product chief, operating chief, president and legal chief. Most of them will also receive higher restricted stock awards, which vest over time.

The stock options come with conditions, as the lowest tranche only pays out if Meta’s share price reaches $1,116.08. That is about 88% above its latest close of $592.92. The highest tier requires the stock to climb to $3,727.12, more than six times its current level.

If the targets are not met by February 2028, the unvested options will be released gradually until August 2030. They expire in March 2031 if unused.

A company spokesperson said the package is a “big bet” and that it “will not be realised unless Meta achieves massive future success, benefiting all of our shareholders.”

This stresses how intense the competition for AI talent has become. Companies such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are offering large pay deals to attract researchers. Meta has also been active, hiring aggressively and acquiring smaller firms to strengthen its AI teams.

In March, the company brought in Dreamer AI, a startup working on advanced AI systems, as part of its expansion into what it calls “superintelligence” research.

Spending has surged alongside hiring, with Meta reporting $72 billion in capital expenditure in 2025 and expects that figure to rise to as much as $135 billion in 2026. Much of that is tied to AI infrastructure, including data centres and computing power.

Analysts expect Meta’s stock to trade between $838 and $935 in 2026, with some forecasts going higher. Even so, the new option targets sit well above those estimates.

Executives only benefit if the company delivers exceptional growth. So, Meta is tying pay to performance, believing AI will drive that outcome.

Pang joined Meta in mid-2025 after leaving Apple, where he focused on AI model infrastructure.

At Meta, Pang oversaw key systems supporting next-generation AI models. His exit comes after months of recruitment by OpenAI, and sources said he left Meta last week.

Meta and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The development reveals the scale of investment companies are making in AI talent. Reports indicate his compensation at Meta was more than $200 million over multiple years.

His work at Meta was a major one in developing the company’s next-generation AI systems, part of its long-term strategy to compete with firms including OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, and Google.

For OpenAI, Ruoming Pang strengthens its infrastructure and ability to scale. His expertise will support the training of larger multimodal models and more advanced AI workflows.

The hire occurs as governments strengthen review of AI development. Canada, for example, has recently urged OpenAI to increase safety measures or face regulatory consequences.

The transaction makes OpenAI the most valuable private company in the world, surpassing Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is valued at $456 billion.

The deal was structured as a secondary sale, allowing staff and former insiders to cash out without the company going public. OpenAI had authorised up to $10.3 billion in stock sales, but only two-thirds were sold. Internally, this limitation is seen as a sign that many employees trust the company’s long-term prospects.

The investor mix also reveals the scale of interest in OpenAI’s growth. Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and T. Rowe Price all bought into the round. SoftBank had already backed OpenAI in its $40 billion primary funding earlier this year, making this a reinforcement of its position.

Financially, the company is growing at a speed that few in Silicon Valley have matched. In the first half of 2025, OpenAI generated about $4.3 billion in revenue, already 16% higher than its full-year revenue for 2024. 

That growth has pushed the company into a league where it stands at the forefront of artificial intelligence and also sits at the centre of the global technology economy.

Alongside the capital raise, OpenAI is also exploring structural changes. Reports reveal the company is in talks with Microsoft to transition into a public benefit corporation. If completed, OpenAI’s nonprofit board would retain governance power, while its commercial arm would continue expanding at scale.

The timing of the share sale shows high competition for talent across the sector. Meta has gone as far as offering nine-figure compensation packages and recently hired Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old co-founder of Scale AI, to head its new superintelligence unit.

For OpenAI, the secondary sale does more than unlock employee liquidity. It functions as a retention strategy, a way to keep top engineers and researchers from defecting to rivals. Other high-value private companies such as Stripe, Databricks, and SpaceX have adopted similar tactics.

With this new valuation, Analysts say OpenAI has shown it can translate massive infrastructure and talent into recurring revenue streams. Billions already flow in and product adoption is growing continuously, hence, OpenAI now looks less like a risky investment and more like an indispensable pillar of the modern technology economy.

The deal, still in early discussions, would give current and former employees an opportunity to cash out shares worth several billion dollars ahead of any initial public offering.

If finalised, the proposed valuation for OpenAI would be a sharp jump from the company’s existing $300 billion figure, stressing its rapid revenue growth and also the escalating race among global tech giants to attract and retain AI talent.

The surge has been driven largely by ChatGPT, OpenAI’s flagship product, which now has around 700 million weekly active users, up from 400 million in February and four times higher than last year. The company’s paying enterprise clients have grown to 5 million, compared to 3 million just two months ago.

Financially, OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue has climbed to $13 billion, from $10 billion in June, with expectations to hit $20 billion by year-end. The company doubled its revenue in the first seven months of the year and is expanding its product reach even as it navigates corporate changes.

The share sale discussions follow OpenAI’s recent $8.3 billion funding injection from investors including Dragoneer, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Fidelity. 

This forms part of a $40 billion fundraising round led by Japan’s SoftBank Group, which has until the end of the year to complete its $22.5 billion commitment. The remainder has already been taken up at a $300 billion valuation, the source said.

The development is similar to private share sales by other high-growth technology firms such as ByteDance, Databricks, and Ramp, which have used such transactions to update market valuations and reward long-standing employees. 

Existing OpenAI investors, including Thrive Capital, are said to be in talks to participate in the sale. Thrive declined to comment.

Competition for AI talent is at an all-time high. Meta, for example, is investing billions in Scale AI in a bid to lure its 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead its new superintelligence division. Across the industry, lucrative compensation offers are becoming the norm for top engineers and researchers.

OpenAI, meanwhile, is preparing for some structural changes. Plans are underway to move away from its capped-profit model, potentially clearing the way for a public listing. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said in May that an IPO would happen only when both “the company and markets were ready.”

The company has also taken steps to reconnect with the open-source community, releasing open-weight models for the first time since 2019, a strategic move to counter competitors such as Anthropic.

A $500 billion valuation would place OpenAI among the most valuable privately held technology companies in history, rivalled only by firms like ByteDance and SpaceX. 

For the AI sector, it would be another sign that the biggest players are not limited to building powerful systems but are also securing the financial firepower to dominate the global market for years to come.

Pang led Apple’s Foundation Models team, responsible for training the AI systems powering recent on-device tools like Genmoji and smart notifications.

His departure, confirmed by insiders, follows growing internal challenges at Apple over its reliance on external models from OpenAI and Anthropic to deliver critical Siri upgrades. 

For a company that prides itself on tight vertical control, outsourcing key AI infrastructure to rivals has raised eyebrows internally and beyond.

Meta, meanwhile, is making no secret of its aggressive expansion plans. Pang now joins its elite AI division, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), which has become a magnet for top talent. 

It’s headed by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, a company Meta recently invested in at a $29 billion valuation. Bloomberg reports that Pang’s compensation at Meta runs into the millions annually.

Pang’s exit comes weeks after his deputy, Tom Gunter, also left Apple, and is part of a pattern of senior AI defections. Mark Zuckerberg has been personally overseeing this high-stakes recruitment wave, pulling in names like Daniel Gross of Safe Superintelligence and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind have also reportedly crossed over to Meta.

“Apple’s recent AI enhancements have been minimal, and the more sought-after features, like the Siri revamp, are being pushed out to 2026,” said Dipanjan Chatterjee, Forrester VP and principal analyst. “Apple’s strong brand equity has absorbed much of this damage without customer defection, but this equity is being steadily eroded as Apple fails to make good on its AI promises.”

While Apple made a strong hardware showing at WWDC 2025, its AI reveal leaned heavily on partnerships, rather than showcasing any breakthrough from its internal teams. That silence from within is now being read as a red flag.

Zhifeng Chen has now taken over Pang’s team, but oversight is fragmented across software boss Craig Federighi, Siri and Vision Pro head Mike Rockwell, and a diminished role for John Giannandrea. 

Analysts say this reshuffling is unlikely to change Apple’s pace, particularly in a market where rivals are throwing around $10 million to $100 million offers just to attract top talent.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in a recent podcast interview with his brother, said, “Meta had been targeting his employees with signing bonuses that went as high as $100 million.”

In an attempt to bolster Meta’s superintelligence initiative, the company has been dangling compensation packages of over $100 million to lure top AI researchers, particularly from OpenAI and Google DeepMind. 

This is tied to an internal drive led by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, now spearheading Meta’s advanced AI team from an office reportedly just steps away from Zuckerberg’s.

Despite the high figures involved in the Meta AI hiring initiative, the campaign has largely hit a wall.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, speaking on the Uncapped podcast with his brother Jack Altman on Tuesday, confirmed the reports and offered his own assessment.

“[Meta has] started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team. You know, like, $100 million signing bonuses, more than that [in] compensation per year […] I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that.”

Meta’s targets reportedly included high-profile figures like OpenAI’s Noam Brown and DeepMind’s Koray Kavukcuoglu, but both declined the offers. 

The failure to secure these names leads to questions about the effectiveness, and ethics, of Meta’s recruitment tactics in what is quickly becoming a high-stakes talent competition.

Altman didn’t stop there as he used the podcast as a platform to criticise Meta’s approach to innovation, drawing a line between OpenAI’s mission-oriented culture and what he sees as Meta’s cash-first strategy.

“I don’t think they’re a company that’s great at innovation,” he said, doubling down on his view that simply catching up isn’t enough in the AI game. Companies, he argued, must genuinely lead.

Beyond recruitment, Meta has poured billions into its AI bets, including a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, the company’s second-largest acquisition after WhatsApp. 

It’s already brought in Google DeepMind’s Jack Rae and Johan Schalkwyk from Sesame AI, among others. However, according to Altman, it will take more than star hires to change a transformative AI journey.

He credits OpenAI’s retention strength, reportedly one of the highest in the industry at 67%, to its focus on a collective mission: achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The underlying message is that for OpenAI’s top engineers, purpose trumps pay; so the Meta AI hiring approach requires a different direction.

There’s also a growing front in the competition for influence, social media. Altman revealed that OpenAI is exploring the development of a new AI-powered social app designed to serve feeds based not on algorithms, but on user intent. It’s a direct shot at the core of Meta’s business model.

Meta, on its end, is already testing similar waters through its Meta AI app, but user feedback has been rocky, with reports of confusion and some deeply personal AI chat interactions accidentally shared more widely than intended, a potential privacy minefield.

If OpenAI succeeds in rolling out a more intuitive, AI-driven alternative to traditional social media, it could disrupt Meta’s position, and how the internet itself is experienced.

So, not just about who can pay the most or hire the fastest, but who is building up to be a deeper contest between purpose and profit, between foundational innovation and reactive ambition. And while Meta may have the cash, OpenAI, for now, seems to have the conviction.