Mark Zuckerberg — in an unprecedented, multibillion-dollar talent raid — has dramatically reset the market for blue-chip AI builders, and further complicated the government's ability to stack its own technology bench, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curtain" column.

• Why it matters: The Meta CEO is trying to lure talent from OpenAI and other tech companies with offers that can top $100 million in total compensation for the first year alone — beyond most star athletes' pay.

Top-tier pay packages being offered by Meta for AI researchers can reach up to $300 million over four years, WIRED reports.

• A tech-news feed on X used a baseball card motif to portray an OpenAI researcher being "TRADED" to Meta.

The talent derby has sent compensation soaring across AI, as rivals scramble to keep top talent and entice others not to flirt with Meta and other suitors.

• It's partly a continuation of an ongoing recruiting war — OpenAI built its lab with the help of some massive comp packages.
• Zuckerberg unveiled his dream team this week as Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), after meeting personally with potential recruits at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe.

🖼️ The big picture: America has witnessed staggering valuations for startups. But never before have we seen company-valuation-sized salaries for people, rather than ideas or enterprises.

• That's injecting a new layer of drama and next-level economics for the biggest companies — many the size of nation-states — racing to win the AI wars.

Collateral damage: The U.S. government is already struggling to recruit top researchers and scientists. A remotely talented AI specialist can now assume that riches in the tens of millions are attainable. So why sacrifice to serve in government?

• China, by contrast, can command top talent to work on government projects. A front-page Wall Street Journal story yesterday, "China Is Quickly Eroding America's Lead in the Global AI Race," said AI models from Chinese companies, including DeepSeek and Alibaba, are becoming popular in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

🔬 Zoom in: Zuckerberg's biggest single bet was investing $14 billion in Scale AI, and bringing co-founder Alex Wang to Meta as chief AI officer. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will lead Meta's work on AI products and applied research.

• Eleven other new AI star hires were listed in Zuckerberg's internal memo announcing Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Altman hit back at Zuckerberg's spree this week, telling OpenAI researchers in a Slack message that Meta "has gotten a few great people for sure, but on the whole, it is hard to overstate how much they didn't get their top people and had to go quite far down their list," WIRED reports.

• "I am proud of how mission-oriented our industry is as a whole; of course there will always be some mercenaries," Altman added. "Missionaries will beat mercenaries."

Column continues below.

Tech investors tell us that until very recently, the revenue outlook for AI models was unclear, and there was a debate about the return on capital spending. Now it's apparent that leading AI companies will do hundreds of billions in revenue per year, Jim and Mike continue.

• OpenAI is enjoying rampaging growth: The company said last month that it has $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, just 2½ years after the launch of ChatGPT — up from $5.5 billion last year. OpenAI has projected for investors that, fueled by AI agents and other new products, sales could total as much as $125 billion in 2029 and $174 billion in 2030, according to documents seen by The Information.
• Anthropic — a rival AI company led by Dario Amodei, an OpenAI alumnus — has hit a pace of $4 billion in revenue annually, up almost four times from January, The Information reported this week.
• At those rates of growth, you can see what Zuckerberg is seeing — and why he's suddenly pouring massive spending into making sure Meta remains a dominant AI player.

The backstory: Zuckerberg is repeating a winning playbook. By 2012, he realized Facebook was behind on the mobile web. He famously redirected the entire company toward catching up.

• Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion and later WhatsApp for $16 billion — racing ahead in areas where others had innovated. But this time he's betting on individuals, rather than successful enterprises.

🥊 Reality check: Meta has spent a fortune on Llama, its large-language model (LLM), in an effort to develop a frontier model that can compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini. In a splashy story about "The List" of AI geniuses Zuckerberg is courting, The Wall Street Journal said Meta's "laggard history in generative AI has made some recruits hesitant."

• Bubbles can burst. AI salaries and data-center costs won't be sustainable without the ultimate payoff being unimaginably huge. And the more these companies spend, the bigger that payoff needs to be. As uncovered by a survey Axios reported last month, many small businesses using AI aren't even paying for it.

The other side: Altman, noting that OpenAI has built "a culture that is good at repeatable innovation," said last month on a podcast hosted by Jack Altman, his younger brother, that Meta was making "giant offers to a lot of people on our team — like $100 million signing bonuses" and more than that in annual compensation.

• "We're set up such that if we succeed ... then everybody will do great financially," Sam Altman said. "[I]t's incentive-aligned with mission-first, and then economic rewards and everything else flowing from that."

Share this column ... Scott Rosenberg, Ben Berkowitz and Zachary Basu contributed reporting.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said early this morning that he believes he has the votes to get President Trump's "big, beautiful bill" across the finish line this morning, "right when everyone is waking up to have their coffee," Axios' Andrew Solender and Kate Santaliz report from the Capitol.

• Why it matters: Johnson is racing to meet Republicans' self-imposed deadline to pass the marquee tax and spending bill, which they hope will get to the president's desk by tomorrow — July 4th.

Republicans broke the record for the longest House vote, holding open a procedural vote for 7 hours, 24 minutes as they tried to cajole GOP holdouts.

• Johnson continued to huddle with holdouts off the House floor past midnight. Trump has been working the phones in coordination with Johnson, the speaker told Fox News' Sean Hannity.
• "There's no cracking of skulls," Johnson said. "This is part of the process. We're tying up loose ends."

Keep reading.

Tesla's electric vehicle deliveries — a close proxy for sales — plunged 13.5% in the second quarter as the company continues to face backlash from CEO Elon Musk's political turn, Axios' Nathan Bomey writes.

• Why it matters: EVs are an essential source of cash flow for Tesla as it pursues ambitious projects such as self-driving cars and humanoid robots.

Go deeper.

Press freedom advocates are sounding the alarm following Paramount's $16 million settlement with President Trump, arguing the deal sets a dangerous new precedent — particularly for smaller outlets with fewer legal resources.

• Why it matters: A steady decline in media trust, coupled with enormous financial challenges, has made the press more vulnerable to political pressure campaigns than ever before, Axios' Sara Fischer writes.

Between the lines: The deal has drawn outrage from critics who believe Paramount, which owns CBS, could have won what they believe is a frivolous lawsuit.

• The size of the agreement is nearly identical to ABC's settlement with Trump last year. But Paramount is under fire because its deal comes as the company seeks regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance Media.

A Wall Street Journal editorial said yesterday that this moment feels like a turning point for press freedom: "The President is using government to intimidate news outlets that publish stories he doesn't like. It's a low move in a free country with a free press."

• Share this story ... Get Axios Media Trends.

A House of Representatives intern, a rising senior at UMass Amherst, was fatally shot while walking in a busy part of Northwest D.C. on Monday night, Rep. Ron Estes (R-Kan.) announced.

• D.C. police said the intern — Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, 21, of Granby, Mass. — was apparently an innocent bystander caught in a spray of bullets intended for someone else, The Washington Post reports.

Tarpinian-Jachym, who was majoring in finance with a minor in political science, joined Estes' office in June.

• "I will remember his kind heart and how he always greeted anyone who entered our office with a cheerful smile," Estes said.

The shooting happened downtown near the huge Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Investigators say "multiple people climbed out of a car at Seventh and M and began firing into a group of people," The Post reports:

• "Tarpinian-Jachym was walking in the area of Seventh and M streets NW shortly before 10:30 p.m. Monday when officers nearby heard gunshots. They hurried to the scene and found three people shot: Tarpinian-Jachym, a woman and a 16-year-old boy."
• "All three were taken to hospitals. Police said Tarpinian-Jachym died Tuesday."

More from the Post (gift link) ... Police statement.

President Trump wants to "drill baby drill." But some producers in the heart of the oil patch say Trump's trade policies are discouraging drilling, Axios Generate author Ben Geman writes.

• Why it matters: Reluctance to ramp up drilling could limit how much prices might fall at the pump.

Zoom in: The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas yesterday released its quarterly survey of execs in its region, which includes the prolific Permian Basin.

• "The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry," one executive told the Fed. "Drill, baby, drill will not happen with this level of volatility."

Keep reading ... Get Axios Generate.

Ken Burns told Axios' Noah Bressner that his forthcoming six-part series — "The American Revolution" — has been in the works since December 2015 and required "years and years and years" of filming war reenactors across the 13 original colonies.

• The 12-hour film — directed by Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt — will premiere Nov. 16 on PBS and run for six consecutive nights.

Why it matters: "It's about really big ideas, the biggest ideas in humankind, and it's also an incredibly violent struggle," the legendary filmmaker tells us.

• "I think that we've papered over the violence, maybe because we don't have any photographs or newsreels."

Burns' other documentary epics — including "The Civil War," "Baseball" and "The Vietnam War" — have heavily featured archival photographs and footage.

• This time, Burns "realized you had to get over an aversion" to reenactments, which he's used sparingly in other projects.
• The film crew shot reenactors in nearly 100 locations "in every time of day and every season, mostly at dawn or dusk."

"Then we used paintings," Burns added. "I go and I say, 'Do we have Continentals firing at the British?' And we have a musket volley, very close up, very impressionistic. And we then have a returning British volley. And then that melds with the painting."

• Burns said the film has more maps than in all of the other films he's made combined — "and I've been doing this for a little while."

Watch the trailer ... Keep reading.