{"id":894962,"date":"2026-09-17T05:48:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T05:48:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/894962\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T05:48:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T05:48:16","slug":"andrew-tullochs-2-1b-meta-salary-wasnt-enough-so-he-left-for-anthropic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/894962\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrew Tulloch\u2019s $2.1b Meta salary wasn\u2019t enough. So he left for Anthropic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"David<\/p>\n

September 17, 2026 \u2014 11:50am<\/p>\n

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The biggest developments in technology, from AI to social media and major hacks to start-ups, are covered in the weekly newsletter by our technology editor, David Swan. He covers the devices that command so much of our attention, too. Sig<\/a>n<\/a> up<\/a> here <\/a>to get the full newsletter \u2013 with more material than is published here \u2013 before it goes online.<\/p>\n

\"AndrewAndrew Tulloch is on the move from Meta.<\/p>\n

The Australians on the ground in San Francisco can talk about little else this week. AI\u2019s hottest commodity Andrew Tulloch, who grew up in Perth and studied at the University of Sydney<\/a>, has left Meta after less than 12 months.<\/p>\n

The numbers are mind-boggling: Tulloch\u2019s full package with Meta was reportedly worth $US1.5 billion ($2.1 billion) over six years \u2212 a figure a Meta spokesman has called \u201cinaccurate and ridiculous\u201d. If true, or even close to true, it would have made a bloke from Perth the highest-paid employee in the history of the technology industry.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s now left for a rival before his first anniversary, joining Claude maker Anthropic, according to <\/a>The Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n

Tulloch previously spent 11 years at Facebook and was a pivotal engineer on PyTorch, the open-source framework Meta\u2019s entire AI strategy is built on.<\/p>\n

Related Article\"Sam<\/a><\/p>\n

He then co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with OpenAI\u2019s former chief technology officer, which raised $US2 billion in seed funding. Meta reportedly tried to buy the whole company. When that didn\u2019t work, it went after him instead.<\/p>\n

His resume is aggressively Aussie: Christ Church Grammar, a perfect 99.95, school vice-captain, first XI cricket, then a university medal in advanced mathematics at Sydney and a master\u2019s at Cambridge. A brief stop at Goldman Sachs in Sydney before he left.<\/p>\n

He timed this exit neatly. Tulloch had been holding off until Meta shipped Muse, its new AI agent<\/a>, which landed the day before he announced he was going. Meta shares slipped on the news.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe smartest person in a place full of them,\u201d is how one Aussie here describes Tulloch. \u201cDefinitely an extreme genius,\u201d is how a former Facebook executive put it to Forbes.<\/p>\n

He lands at Anthropic as the AI firm heads towards an October listing at a reported target near $US2 trillion, working on how efficiently customers reach models running in data centres.<\/p>\n

\"AheadAhead of the G20 meeting, Assistant Technology Minister Andrew Charlton swung through Silicon Valley to meet leaders of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and other tech giants.Louise Kennerley<\/p>\n

So a man from Perth is central to answering the same question everyone is arguing about right now: what it really costs to run all of this.<\/p>\n

Tulloch is perhaps the peak example of Australia\u2019s \u201cbrain drain\u201d problem, along with the likes of Tristan Buckmaster, the Australian mathematician who is taking on OpenAI<\/a>. The Assistant Minister for Science and Technology Andrew Charlton met with Tulloch on his US tour this month<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAustralia has a real reputation for generating the people who are the most capable in this space,\u201d Charlton said on Monday. \u201cAnd yeah, quite frankly, we want some of them to come home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Good luck. The going rate is about a billion and a half.<\/p>\n

Get news and reviews on technology, gadgets and gaming in our Technology newsletter. Sign up to receive it every Wednesday<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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\"DavidDavid Swan<\/a> is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X<\/a> or email<\/a>.From our partners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"September 17, 2026 \u2014 11:50am Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":894963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-894962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=894962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/894963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}