Forget billion dollar contracts! Mark Zuckerberg is now delivering homemade soup to poach talent

Alongside hefty pay packages, Mark Zuckerberg has added an interesting personal touch to lure new talent.

We have seen big-name companies like Meta offer lucrative billion-dollar packages to poach talent from rival companies like OpenAI recently. What if I told you that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is taking an entirely new approach, which could be surprising for a lot of people, wherein he is actually home-delivering homemade soup to poach potential employees.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly betting big on expensive new hires. (AP)

By Shaurya Sharma

Shaurya Sharma is the Technology Editor at Hindustan Times Digital Streams, where he oversees technology coverage across digital and social platforms. With over eight years of experience across editorial, video production, and digital media, his work focuses on smartphones, AI, consumer gadgets, and shaping audience-first content strategies for modern tech consumers.

He began his career in 2018 as a fashion cinematographer before turning his lifelong passion for technology into a profession. From spending his childhood immersed in tech magazines, video games, and the latest gadgets to covering the global consumer tech industry today, technology has remained a constant throughout his journey.

Over the years, Shaurya has worked with some of India’s leading media organisations, including CNN-News18, Sportskeeda, and Guiding Tech, where he led video initiatives that combined strong editorial storytelling with engaging visual and social-first execution.

A graduate in Journalism and Mass Communication from Manipal University, Shaurya has reviewed hundreds of products across categories including smartphones, laptops, gaming consoles, cameras, and wearables. Beyond work, he is passionate about animal welfare, environmental causes, and automobiles, particularly turbo-petrol cars

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Mark Zuckerberg’s New Way To Lure Talent

How do we know this? Well, Mark Chen, who is the Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, confirmed the same during a podcast with Ashlee Vance. So, while Meta has a lot of backing at its bay with a $10B budget for talent, Mark Zuckerberg has gone the extra mile and added a super personal way of luring talent inside Meta.

During the podcast, Mark Chen said that Zuckerberg personally hand-delivered soup to potential employees he wanted to poach from OpenAI. Chen said it was shocking to him at the time.

OpenAI To Makes Its Own “Soup”

He went on to say that he was initially shocked by this approach and was taken aback. But he explained that over time he has definitely thought that these things could be effective in their own way. He went on to say that he has himself thought about it and he would also be taking soup to potential recruits. He said, however, his approach will be different compared to Zuckerberg’s and instead of the homemade soup by Zuckerberg, he would be taking Michelin-star soup. “It’s better if you get like, Michelin star soup,” he said.

Not The First Of Meta’s Extreme Measures

This is not the first time Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has reportedly followed a series of extreme measures to poach top talent. Earlier this July, reports claimed that Meta had offered up to $1 billion in salary to lure potential hires from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab. At the time, those working at Thinking Machines Lab were said to have declined Zuckerberg’s offer.