The hundred million dollar signing bonus nobody can prove

In June 2025 Sam Altman said on a podcast that Meta had offered his people hundred-million-dollar signing bonuses. It went everywhere.

Meta never confirmed it. Two days later its chief technology officer declined to confirm the figure on camera. A person named as a recipient denied receiving it. Altman was later accused by Meta's own executives of being dishonest about it.

The number is still repeated as fact.

What is actually documented

We went through the biggest reported AI pay packages of the last year and asked one question of each: who said this, and did the employer confirm it?

• $100m signing bonuses. Source: a podcast. Employer response: never confirmed, publicly disputed.
• $1.5bn over six years for one researcher. Source: a newspaper. Employer response: called the description "inaccurate and ridiculous" on the record.
• $250m over four years. Source: a newspaper. Employer response: none.
• $1bn-plus for a single staffer. Source: a magazine, unnamed sources. Employer response: none.
• $2.4bn to hire a startup's team. The employer confirmed the hire, on the record. It did not confirm the price.

One number in the whole set is genuinely documented: $14.3bn for 49% of a company. That is a transaction filed with regulators, not a salary, and it tells you nothing about what anyone earns.

The part that is checkable

Here is what makes this worth writing rather than repeating.

The companies generating those headlines publish almost nothing about the benefits an ordinary employee receives. The companies being raided publish a great deal.

OpenAI documents 24 weeks for birthing parents and 20 for partners. Anthropic documents 22 and 22, equal for every parent, which is a deliberate statement about who is expected to take leave. Both are on their own careers pages, dated, and you can click them.

Meta, which produced every nine-figure headline of the last eighteen months, has no documented family-leave figure we can verify at all. What we hold is second-hand and we have marked it as such.

Why this is the whole point

A pay package that cannot be sourced is a story about a company. A parental-leave policy on a careers page is a promise to a person who has to decide something.

Nine figures for one researcher is a rumour. Twenty-two weeks for every parent is a document.

One of those you can act on. We publish that one, and we say plainly when the other is only journalism.