Is Meta really spending $15 billion to hire a 28-year-old?

• Meta reportedly plans to buy nearly half of Scale AI for $15 billion.
• In theory, Mark Zuckerberg is interested in securing Scale AI's data services.
• But this looks a lot like an acquihire — buying a company for its talent. In this case, Zuckerberg is particuarly interested in cofounder Alexandr Wang.

You probably don't know who Alexandr Wang is. But that's going to change: The 28-year-old is about to become known as the guy Mark Zuckerberg spent $15 billion on.

Wang is the CEO of Scale AI, a data company that works with giant AI leaders like Meta and OpenAI. And Meta is reportedly about to spend $15 billion to buy a 49% stake in Scale AI.

What does Meta get for that investment — which values Scale AI at close to $30 billion, about double its last valuation from a year ago?

In theory, that money lets Meta cement its relationship with a company important to its AI ambitions. In practice, that money buys Wang and a handful of his lieutenants.

"This is a very expensive acquihire of Alexandr Wang," tech analyst Ben Thompson writes, echoing the now-conventional wisdom of the yet-to-be-announced investment. I've asked both Meta and Scale AI for comment.

An acquihire is traditionally a deal in which a small startup with limited prospects sells itself to a bigger player, which is usually more interested in the company's employees than whatever it's supposed to be making. Oftentimes, the acquired company stops making whatever it was trying to sell once the deal closes.

Acquihires are usually considered a "soft landing" for startups' founders and employees — because it secures employment for at least some of them — and for the startups' investors, who may be able to recoup some of their investment.

Those deals were quite common in Silicon Valley until recent years, when President Joe Biden's antitrust officials made M&A relatively rare.

Now they are starting to pick up again — particularly when it comes to AI, where deals have come with huge price tags. Last year, for instance, Microsoft paid a reported $650 million to AI startup Inflection, in what is technically a licensing fee but is essentially the price to hire company founder Mustafa Suleyman and some of his team. Then Google paid $2.7 billion for a similarly structured deal with Character.AI, primarily to hire founder Noam Shazeer and some of his employees.

Now Zuckerberg appears to be super-sizing that pattern with his newest deal, and reportedly wants Wang to join a new AI lab populated by superstar researchers.

You can argue, as Semafor's Reed Albergotti does, that the $15 billion pricetag Zuckerberg would be paying isn't really an acquihire, since at least some of that money is supposed to be an advance on future work Scale AI will do for Meta.

But most folks I've talked to in tech believe that the real motivation here is to bring Wang into the fold — in the same way that Apple's $3 billion acquisition of Beats wasn't really because Tim Cook wanted the company's headphone business, but because he wanted the taste and aura of cofounder Jimmy Iovine.

Which makes it all the more curious that Wang isn't known as a blue-chip, big-brained AI scientist. He is "essentially a business guy with technical chops, not the kind of elite researcher Zuckerberg recently had been lavishing with attention — and offers of gigantic paydays, The Information reports. "His talents lie in promoting the company rather than managing its staff or furthering AI research, according to multiple people who have worked with him," per the Financial Times.

And regardless of what Zuckerberg thinks Wang can do for him, he has plenty of cautionary tales from his past, where he has bought up high-profile talent who end up leaving. Both the cofounders of Instagram and the cofounders of WhatsApp have left the company after Zuckerberg spent billions on them, and Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger is now essentially competing with Meta, via his role as chief product officer at Anthropic.

The flipside of the argument: There aren't many companies that can afford to burn billions on a hiring deal, but Meta is definitely one of them. And if you've convinced yourself, as Zuckerberg apparently has, that the future of tech — and your business — is AI, then any amount you spend will be worth it in the end if it works out.