When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerbergpoached Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang last week as part of a $14.3 billion investment in the artificial intelligence startup, he was apparently just getting started.
Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar AI hiring spree has now turned to Daniel Gross, the CEO of Ilya Sutskever’s startup Safe Superintelligence, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.
It’s not how Zuckerberg planned for a deal to go down.
Earlier this year, sources said, Meta tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence, which was reportedly valued at $32 billion in a fundraising round in April. Sutskever, who just launched the startup a year ago, shortly after leaving OpenAI, rebuffed Meta’s efforts, as well as the company’s attempt to hire him, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the information is confidential.
Soon after those talks ended, Zuckerberg started negotiating with Gross, the sources said. In addition to his role at Safe Superintelligence, Gross runs a venture capital firm with Friedman called NFDG, their combined initials.
Both men are joining Meta as part of the transaction, and will work on products under Wang, one source said. Meta, meanwhile, will get a stake in NFDG, according to multiple sources.
The Information was first to report on Meta’s plans to hire Gross and Friedman.
Gross, Friedman and Sutskever didn’t respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
A Meta spokesperson said the company “will share more about our superintelligence effort and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks.”
Zuckerberg’s aggressive hiring tactics escalate an AI talent war that’s reached new heights of late. Meta, Google and OpenAI, along with a host of other big companies and high-valued startups, are racing to develop the most powerful large language models, and pushing towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that’s considered equal to or greater than human intelligence.
Last week, Meta agreed to pump $14.3 billion into Scale AI to bring on Wang and a few other top engineers while getting a 49% stake in the startup.
Altman said on the latest episode of the “Uncapped” podcast, which is hosted by his brother, that Meta has tried to lure OpenAI employees by offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million, with even larger annual compensation packages. Altman said “none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”
“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” Altman said on the podcast. “Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they have hoped and I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things.”
Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment on Altman’s remarks.
OpenAI, for its part, has gone to similar lengths, paying about $6.5 billion to hire iPhone designer Jony Ive and to acquire his nascent devices startup io.
Elsewhere, the founders of AI startup Character.AI were recruited back to Google last year in a multibillion-dollar deal, while DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman was brought on by Microsoft in a $650 million purchase of talent from Inflection AI.
In Gross, Zuckerberg is getting a longtime entrepreneur and AI investor. Gross founded the search engine Cue, which was acquired by Apple in 2013. He was a top executive at Apple and helped lead machine learning efforts and the development of Siri. He was later a partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator, before co‑founding Safe Superintelligence alongside Sutskever.
Friedman co-founded two startups before becoming the CEO of GitHub following Microsoft’s acquisition of the code-sharing platform in 2018.
NFDG has backed Coinbase, Figma, CoreWeave, Perplexity and Character.ai over the years, according to Pitchbook. It’s unclear what happens to its investment portfolio in a Meta deal, a source said.
The Hers app arranged on a smartphone in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of Hims & Hers Health fell 9% in extended trading on Monday after the telehealth company reported second-quarter results that missed Wall Street’s expectations for revenue.
Here’s how the company did based on average analysts’ estimates compiled by LSEG:
Earnings per share: 17 cents adjusted vs. 15 cents
Revenue: $544.8 million vs. $552 million
Revenue at Hims & Hers increased 73% in the second quarter from $315.6 million during the same period last year, according to a release. Hims & Hers reported a net income of $42.5 million, or 17 cents per share, compared to $13.3 million, or 6 cents per share, during the same period a year earlier.
For its third quarter, Hims & Hers said it expected to report revenue between $570 million to $590 million, while analysts were expecting $583 million. The company said its adjusted EBITDA for the quarter will be between the range of $60 million to $70 million. Analysts polled by StreetAccount were expecting $77.1 million.
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Hims & Hers has faced controversy in recent months over its continued sale of compounded GLP-1s, which are cheaper, unapproved versions of the blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs. Compounded drugs can be mass produced when brand-name treatments are in shortage, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in February that ongoing supply issues had been resolved.
Some telehealth companies, including Hims & Hers, have continued to offer the compounded medications. It’s legal for patients to access personalized doses of the knockoffs in unique cases, like if they are allergic to an ingredient in a branded product, for instance. Hims & Hers has said consumers may still be able to access personalized doses through its site if clinically applicable.
In June, Hims & Hers shares tumbled more than 30% after a short-lived collaboration with Novo Nordisk fell apart. The drugmaker said Hims & Hers “failed to adhere to the law which prohibits mass sales of compounded drugs” under the “false guise” of personalization.
Hims & Hers reported adjusted EBITDA of $82 million for its second quarter, up from $39.3 million last year and above the $73 million expected by StreetAccount.
Hims & Hers will host its quarterly call with investors at 5 p.m. ET.
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YTD chart of Hims & Hers Health.
–CNBC’s Annika Kim Constantino contributed to this report
Palantir topped Wall Street’s estimates Monday, surpassing $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, and hiking its full-year guidance.
Shares rallied more than 5%.
Here’s how the company did versus LSEG estimates:
Earnings per share: 16 cents adj. vs. 14 cents expected
Revenue: $1.00 billion vs. $940 million expected
The artificial intelligence software provider’s revenues grew 48% during the period. Analysts hadn’t expected the $1 billion revenue benchmark from the Denver-based company until the fourth quarter of this year.
“The growth rate of our business has accelerated radically, after years of investment on our part and derision by some,” wrote CEO Alex Karp in a letter to shareholders. “The skeptics are admittedly fewer now, having been defanged and bent into a kind of submission.”
The software analytics company also boosted its full-year outlook guidance. For the full year, Palantir now expects revenues to range between $4.142 billion and $4.150 billion, up from prior guidance of $3.89 billion to $3.90 billion.
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For the third quarter, Palantir forecast revenues between $1.083 billion and $1.087 billion, beating an analyst estimate of $983 million. Palantir also lifted its operating income and full-year free cash flow guidance.
Palantir’s U.S. revenues jumped 68% from a year ago to $733 million, while U.S. commercial revenues nearly doubled from a year ago to $306 million.
The software analytics company has seen a boost from President Donald Trump‘s government efficiency campaign, which included layoffs and contract cuts. Palantir’s U.S. government revenues jumped 53% from the year-ago period to $426 million.
“It has been a steep and upward climb — an ascent that is a reflection of the remarkable confluence of the arrival of language models, the chips necessary to power them, and our software infrastructure,” Karp wrote in a letter to shareholders.
During the quarter, Palantir said it closed 66 deals of at least $5 million and 42 deals totaling at least $10 million. Total value of its contracts grew 140% from last year to $2.27 billion.
Net income rose 144% to about $326.7 million, or 13 cents a share, from about $134.1 million, or 6 cents per share a year ago.
Palantir shares have more than doubled this year as investors bet on the company’s AI tools and contract agreements with governments.
Its market value has accelerated past $379 billion and into the list of top 20 most valuable U.S companies, surpassing Salesforce, IBM and Cisco to join the top 10 U.S. tech companies by market cap. Shares hit a new high Monday.
At its size, buying the stock requires investors to pay hefty multiples.
Shares currently trade 276 times forward earnings, according to FactSet. Tesla is the only other top 20 with a triple-digit ratio at 177.
Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim sits for an interview at the Firefly Aerospace mission operations center in Leander, Texas, on July 9, 2025.
Sergio Flores | Reuters
Firefly Aerospace has lifted the share price range for its upcoming initial public offering in a move that would value the space technology company at more than $6 billion.
The lunar lander and rocket maker said in a filing Monday that it expects to price shares in its upcoming IPO between $41 and $43 apiece.
Firefly’s new target range would raise nearly $697 million at the top end of the range. That’s up from the previously expected $35 to $39 price per share that Firefly announced in a filing last week, which targeted a $5.5 billion valuation.
Firefly announced plans to go public last month as interest in space technology gains steam, and billionaire-led companies such as Elon Musk‘s SpaceX rake in more funding.
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The industry has also begun testing the public markets after a long hiatus in IPO deal activity, with space tech firm Voyager debuting in June.
Firefly makes rockets, space tugs and lunar landers, and is widely known for its satellite launching rockets known as Alpha.
The company has partnered with major defense players such as Lockheed Martin, L3Harris and NASA, and received a $50 million investment from defense contractor Northrop Grumman.
Firefly’s revenues jumped from $8.3 million a year ago to $55.9 million at the end of March, the company said. Its net loss grew to $60.1 million, from $52.8 million a year ago.