Zuck's “Originality Is Overrated” Tour Rolls Into Apple HQ With a Checkbook the Size of Montana

Let’s take a moment to appreciate something that would make your high school ethics teacher slam their head against a chalkboard… Mark Zuckerberg is once again proving that originality is extremely overrated.

His original claim to fame? Launching Facebook based on an idea that allegedly wasn’t his in the first place. The Winklevoss twins (who look like they were created in a protein lab) handed him the concept on a silver platter, then watched as he ran off with it and changed the internet forever. But hey, no hard feelings, right? They sued, walked away with $65 million, bought some Bitcoin, and now they’re billionaires too. Everyone wins… except originality.

Fast-forward 21 years later and Zuck’s strategy hasn’t changed at all. When Elon Musk decided to buy Twitter and rename it “X” like a cologne from the early 2000s… Zuck took one look at the attention he was getting and cloned it. Threads launched almost overnight and rumor has it he even scooped up some of Elon’s recently fired Twitter engineers to do it. Because if you’re going to copy someone, might as well also poach their workforce while you’re at it. But now he’s got a bigger fish to copy (the future of artificial intelligence) and unlike most tech CEOs… his strategy isn’t to innovate faster… It’s to outbid every nerd in the room.

Case in point, Meta just poached Apple’s top AI exec (Ruoming Pang) the guy who led Apple’s foundation models team. That’s the team behind “Apple Intelligence,” which powers stuff like Genmoji, Siri upgrades, and other futuristic features that totally weren’t ready at launch (but that’s beside the point).

So why would Apple’s AI brain jump ship? Zuck is throwing around compensation packages that challenge the top wide receivers in the NFL. We’re talking “tens of millions per year”, with some reports suggesting up to $100 million in sign-on bonuses. (If your kid isn’t studying computer science yet… maybe give them a nudge.)

(Source: TechCrunch)

Zuck even hosts recruits at his homes in Silicon Valley and Lake Tahoe… like a techy version of “The Bachelor,” but instead of roses and a bunch of cringey 30 year old social media influencers, he’s handing out equity and GPU clusters. And you better believe this isn’t some one-off corporate betrayal. Pang is just the latest in a string of high-profile hires for Meta’s newly formed “superintelligence” team… which sounds pretty serious if you ask me.

Pang is far from the only one. In the past few months, Zuck has vacuumed up top talent from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and even Scale AI… where Meta spent $14.3 billion to buy a 49% stake and now has CEO Alexandr Wang on the payroll. It’s a full-blown corporate raid, and the message is clear: if you’ve ever whispered the word “transformer model” in a team meeting, Meta is probably already drawing up your offer letter.

That’s a full-on smash and grab of Silicon Valley’s top AI talent. And while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called these offers “distasteful,” Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth basically told him to quit whining. Meanwhile, Apple’s AI efforts are starting to look like they’re being run by a 65-year-old retired construction worker who just discovered ChatGPT last week. Despite spending billions on internal development, Apple is now reportedly considering ditching its own AI models to use third-party ones from OpenAI or Anthropic. The departure of Pang (and his deputy Tom Gunter) only adds more meetings to the calendar to talk about that.

Pang’s departure just deepens the cracks already showing inside Apple’s AI team. Morale’s sliding downhill, engineers are quietly lining up their next moves, and leadership is rearranging the org chart every week at this point.

Love him or loathe him, Zuck is doing what he’s always done… sniffing out what’s working, copying it, and throwing enough cash at it to drown out the criticism. He’s not trying to invent the wheel… he’s trying to buy the guy who invented the wheel… and then make him build a faster one inside Meta HQ.

And if paying a couple hundred million to form the “AI Dream Team” gets him a leg up on Google, OpenAI, and Apple? You better believe he’ll do it with a straight face in a hoodie (right after Jiu Jitsu practice).

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Meta, Apple, and Google as mentioned in the article.