Meta’s multi-hundred million dollar comp offers and Google’s multi-billion dollar Character AI and Windsurf deals signal that we are in a crazy AI talent bubble.

The talent mania could fizzle out as the winners and losers of the AI war emerge, but it represents a new normal for the foreseeable future. If the top 1 percent of companies drive the majority of VC returns, why shouldn’t the same apply to talent? Our natural egalitarian bias makes this unpalatable to accept, but the 10x engineer meme doesn’t go far enough — there are clearly people that are 1,000x the baseline impact.

This inequality certainly manifests at the founder level (Founders Fund exists for a reason), but applies to employees too. Key people have driven billions of dollars in value — look at Jony Ive’s contribution to the iPhone, or Jeff Dean’s implementation of distributed systems at Google, or Andy Jassy’s incubation of AWS.