X's Director Challenges Meta to a Snack War to Poach AI Engineers

On June 18, Nikita Bier, Product Director at X (formerly Twitter), made a pointed public announcement: X is ready to match or exceed the snack budgets of any competing employer to recruit software engineers and data scientists. Bier singled out Meta employees directly, encouraging them to include the keyword "snacks" in their software engineer applications, which carry listed salaries ranging from $180,000 to $440,000 per year.

Meta's morale at a historic low

The timing was calculated. In early June, Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew "Boz" Bosworth acknowledged publicly that employee morale had hit a historic low, attributable to mass layoffs combined with disruptive internal AI restructuring. Meta responded by allowing affected employees to transfer to other internal teams, increasing budgets for corporate travel, events, and snacks, and planning a large-scale hackathon for July.

Meta's engineers face dual pressure: restructuring uncertainty and fear of AI replacement — right as X extends a conspicuous talent offer.

xAI's gravitational pull

Bier's pitch carries weight from the halo of the xAI ecosystem. SpaceX recently IPO'd at a $1.77 trillion valuation, making it the world's sixth most valuable company and creating over 4,000 new millionaires. Meta, by comparison, ranks 12th in market capitalization. The talent arms race among Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and xAI is being fought on every front — and while snack budgets seem trivial, they are concrete signals of company culture and total compensation philosophy that candidates scrutinize closely. (Source: VnExpress.)