Meta Defies Hiring Freeze to Poach Yet Another Apple Employee—Talent War Heats Up

Meta just swiped another key player from Apple's roster—despite an active hiring freeze. The move signals aggressive talent acquisition in the augmented reality and hardware space, where both tech giants are racing to dominate.

Why It Matters

This isn't the first time Meta's raided Apple's talent pool. The ongoing poaching battle highlights the critical shortage of top-tier engineers and designers who can bridge the gap between software and cutting-edge hardware.

Bigger Picture

While Meta talks a big game about the metaverse, investors are growing impatient. Burning cash on high-profile hires while revenue growth plateaus? Classic tech move—prioritize vision over viability. Because nothing says 'innovation' like buying your competition's brainpower.

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This hiring spree shows how aggressively Meta is pushing to gain an edge in the AI market. It is worth noting that Frank Chu’s work at Apple was quite significant. Indeed, he helped manage the infrastructure needed to run large language models on Apple’s cloud servers, played a role in training these models, and helped improve the search capabilities for Siri and Apple’s entertainment platforms.

Hiring Freeze

Interestingly, Meta’s aggressive hiring has reportedly led it to pause hiring in its AI superintelligence division due to investor worries about rising costs. According to The Wall Street Journal, the freeze began last week as part of an internal restructuring, with any hiring exceptions now requiring approval from Meta’s new AI chief, Alexandr Wang. Notably, the company has used reverse acquihires and nine-figure offers to lure top talent, including acquiring a stake in Scale AI to bring in Wang. However, analysts worry that stock-based compensation could hurt long-term shareholder returns.

Is Meta a Buy, Sell, or Hold?

Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on META stock based on 41 Buys, four Holds, and zero Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. Furthermore, the average META price target of $871.84 per share implies 15.4% upside potential.