X is taking a very public shot at Meta’s internal unrest, using job offers and a joke about snack budgets to lure engineers and data specialists. The move comes as morale at Meta has reportedly weakened after large layoffs and a sweeping reorganization centered on AI.
The timing matters because the battle among major tech companies is no longer only about building better models. It is also about who can keep the people behind those models from walking out the door, and X appears eager to exploit that tension.
X turns recruitment into a pointed message
Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said on X that the company is hiring web engineers, data engineers, and data scientists. He also joked that X would match or exceed the snack budget Meta offers, a remark clearly aimed at catching the attention of potential recruits.
In a follow-up post, Bier shared a link to the xAI technical job board and jokingly asked applicants to include the word “snacks” in their applications. The tone was playful, but the message underneath was direct: X wants to pull talent from a rival that is under pressure internally.
Meta’s morale problem has become hard to ignore
Meta’s internal strain has been building for months. The company cut about 8,000 workers in May and then moved thousands more as part of its push deeper into AI, creating a widespread sense of disruption inside the organization.
About 6,500 engineers and product managers were reassigned from different teams to work on AI projects. That shift left many employees adjusting to new roles and priorities, and reports said some were unhappy with the scale of the change.
Business Insider reported that Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said morale was near an all-time low. The report also said some employees described the mandatory AI task force assignments as if they had been “drafted.”
The conflict goes beyond one company
The tension has also shown up in smaller but telling ways. In April, Meta faced employee pushback over efforts to track mouse movement and keyboard activity to help improve the company’s AI models.
That resistance shows why the current competition is larger than product roadmaps or model benchmarks. Companies now have to persuade workers that the mission, the culture, and the daily reality of the job are worth staying for.
Meta says it is trying to reset the culture
Bosworth told staff in a memo that Meta must become “the best place for the best people to do the best work of their lives.” According to a copy of the memo obtained by Business Insider and first reported by Wired, he also said he hoped to revive the best parts of the culture that originally drew employees to the company.
That effort, however, is unfolding while rivals are moving fast. X’s recruitment push shows how quickly a weakened internal mood can become an opening for competitors looking to poach talent.
What began as a joke about snacks is really a sign of a much harder contest. In the AI race, talent is now as valuable as the technology itself, and companies are willing to use every angle available to win it.