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Musk's secret? Elite human capital.
I still can't get over this picture of the Grok 3 team that built arguably the world's best AI in record time. Notice anything?
Exclusively Indian, East Asian, and White.
100% male.
Everyone, or almost everyone, under 40.
No suits.
This is what extreme meritocracy looks like in an intellectual environment. Elon's secret sauce is giving geniuses the space to do genius things with performance as the only metric.
Obviously this can't work for every company. The number of genius workaholics is too small. But Elon found a group of people who were comically undervalued by the market and let them cook.
Too bad in 10 years, the corporate grind will have eaten most of those people. Two or three will make the transition to management. About the same will try to found startups of their own, maybe one ending up destroyed in a lawsuit with Musk. The rest will find the company they work for sets the minimum standard at their highest previous achievement, and added a bunch of corporate BS on top to make that harder to achieve, and will end up burning out in the bit mines.
Aren't they making $500k-1m/y total comp? Set for life even if they do get ground up after ten years.
Everything I've seen is that they make about $300k TC in the Bay, which isn't the insane salary you think it is, with that cost of living.
Twitter's not technically FAANG, but I think they need to compete with those salaries -- for which (especially in the Bay Area) $300K is nowhere near top-end.
Stock grant of that much again would also be nothing special for somebody at all in demand -- so $.5-1M TC sounds about right.
A Senior Software Engineer at Twitter makes about $335k TC. A senior puts you in probably your mid 20s to early 30s depending on how much you grind. A Senior MLE is 387k TC
Source: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/twitter/salaries/software-engineer?country=254 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/twitter/salaries/software-engineer/title/machine-learning-engineer?country=254
Levels tends to be a good source in my experience. If anything its high because people like to brag on levels. Honestly people wild overestimate tech salaries, unless you are a founder, are in at the ground floor, or have some astronomically rare skillset you get a nice 300k+ which isn't much in the Bay.
Aren’t ML / LLM engineers paid more than regular engineers coding the website or database stuff, though?
For context I'm an MLE, and while I'm not in the Bay, what I see is a 10-20% pay bump for MLEs over traditional backend SWEs. Frontend SWEs (Websites and stuff) are paid much less than backend SWEs. Database peeps can make wildly varying salaries depending on how much DevOps stuff they are doing and how critical the Database is.
MLE is generally a really nebulous job title as well, and than can really impact salaries a lot. I'm more analagous to an ML Researcher + SWE, but it can run the gamut from Data Scientist, Mathematician + SWE(I imagine this is a Quant), ML + Database/MLOps, SWE that interfaces with ML models, and most recently LLM specific Engineers (Generally called AI engineers).
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