Who Needs Salary? X’s Nikita Bier Is Poaching Meta Talent With Better Snacks

Nikita Bier, head of product at X, targeted Meta workers with a public recruitment pitch this week. He promised to match or beat any corporate snack budget the company could offer.

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth admitted on an internal call that employee morale is near its worst ever. The May 2026 layoffs cut 8,000 jobs. Meta also forced roughly 7,000 more workers into AI units, giving them little say in the transition.

X Sees an Opening in Meta’s Morale Problem

Bier announced open roles for web and data engineers and data scientists. He aimed the message directly at workers he described as “neglected.”

His pitch was a direct dig at Meta’s crisis response. Rather than leading with salary, he zeroed in on the snack budget. That was the same perk Meta had scrambled to expand after morale collapsed. He pledged X would match or exceed whatever Meta could offer.

Workers on internal forums described Meta’s culture as “dead and depressing.” The core issue runs deeper than office perks, however. Applied AI, a division formed in March, absorbed around 6,500 engineers and product managers with little input from those transferred. Some employees compared it to a labor camp.

Meanwhile, 2026 tech layoff odds on prediction market Polymarket sit at 67%, with Meta’s situation among the factors traders cite. The Meta job cuts wiped out roughly 10% of its workforce in a single round.

Bier is no stranger to weighing in on Meta. He previously defended Mark Zuckerberg after backlash over a whistleblower documentary trailer. That move showed a pattern of engaging publicly with debates around Meta’s leadership and culture.

Read the Original story Who Needs Salary? X’s Nikita Bier Is Poaching Meta Talent With Better Snacks by Phil Haunhorst at beincrypto.com