X Offers 'Neglected Meta Employees' Better Snacks as Zuckerberg Battles a Morale Crisis

Nikita Bier, the head of product at Elon Musk's X, has turned Meta's plan to lift flagging staff morale with better office snacks into an open recruitment pitch, telling 'neglected' engineers that his company will beat whatever snack budget their employer can offer.

In a post on 18 June that drew more than 1.3 million views, Bier wrote: 'Neglected Meta employees: X is hiring web and data engineers & scientists. We will match or even exceed any snack budget offer.' He told software engineering candidates to put the word 'snacks' in their applications.

Bier described the post as a joke, but linked to a real opening: a Software Engineer, X Core Product role advertising annual pay of $180,000 to $440,000 (£135,000 to £330,000).

How a Snack Budget Sparked X's Raid on Meta Talent

The morale problem Bier seized on was real. Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, told staff at an internal session on 2 June that the mood was 'maybe not the worst it's ever been in 20 years here, but it's probably up there', Business Insider reported, likening it to the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In a follow-up memo he conceded that leadership had done 'an atrocious job explaining the vision' behind the AI reorganisation, and offered fixes that included bigger budgets for travel, events, and office snacks. That last detail spread online and prompted Bier's post.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has also tried to steady the company. In a 12 June memo, he admitted Meta had 'made mistakes' in its AI overhaul and pledged to avoid further company-wide layoffs this year, according to Reuters.

As IBTimes UK reported, the unrest followed Meta's decision to cut about 8,000 jobs in May, roughly 10% of its 78,000-strong workforce, and to move thousands more into a new Applied AI division of about 6,500 people. Staff have called the unit 'a gulag', and many objected to monitoring software, running on their laptops since April, that logs keystrokes and screenshots. More than 1,500 signed a petition before the company let them pause it for 30 minutes at a time.

Zuckerberg's Billion-Dollar Talent War Behind the Morale Crisis

While most staff are being offered better snacks, Zuckerberg has spent the past year personally courting a roughly 50-person group of elite AI researchers for Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Signing bonuses have reached as much as $100 million (£75 million), according to OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, and Meta reportedly offered one researcher a package worth up to $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion). The company also paid about $14.3 billion (£10.7 billion) for a 49% stake in Scale AI to recruit its founder, and Zuckerberg has reportedly rearranged office seating to place the team near him.

Most employees have moved the other way. Median total compensation slipped from $417,400 (£311,000) in 2024 to $388,200 (£290,000) last year, after two cuts to the stock portion of annual rises.

The pay cuts came despite record results. Meta posted first-quarter revenue of $56.3 billion (£42 billion), up 33% on a year earlier, and net income of $26.8 billion (£20 billion). Its shares are down about 8% in 2026, valuing the business near $1.7 trillion (£1.3 trillion), and it has guided to as much as $145 billion (£108 billion) in AI capital spending this year, the outlay Meta has framed its job cuts as helping to offset.

X is hiring against a very different financial backdrop. The platform is part of Musk's xAI, a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX, which completed the largest stock market flotation in history on 12 June, raising about $75 billion (£56 billion) and closing its first day valued near $2.1 trillion (£1.58 trillion), among the most valuable listed companies in the United States.

Around 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires through their shares, according to an analysis cited by The New York Times, and Musk became the world's first trillionaire on paper. Meta did not respond to a request for comment, and X did not comment on Bier's post.