The idea behind moonshot pay is that conventional salaries and bonuses don’t motivate the kind of tectonic risk-taking and visionary leadership that turns good companies into generational ones. So boards offer executives the chance to get extraordinarily rich—but only if they deliver extraordinarily rare results.

This week Meta put a twist on the typical playbook: it extended moonshot-level stock grants to a broader swath of senior leaders that did not include CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 

The move may usher in a new wave of compensation packages for non-CEO C-Suite executives that are just as speculative as other investments in this stage of the AI race.  

Inside Meta’s ‘big bet’

In SEC filings late Tuesday, Meta disclosed the new stock option program for its top executives that promises massive payouts if the tech giant achieves the ambitious goal of growing its market capitalization from roughly $1.5 trillion to $9 trillion by 2031. If Meta hits that mark, Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan, Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, Chief Financial Officer Susan Li, Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney and Vice Chairman Dina Powell McCormick would unlock options worth up to $625.6 million each, according to analysis by Equilar, a compensation research firm. That sum could rise to as much as $921 million when accounting for the restricted stock units Meta awarded to some of the executives, Equilar says.

A Meta spokesperson called the program a “big bet” that will not reward the executives unless “Meta achieves massive future success, benefiting all of our shareholders.”

Compensation experts have long been wary of this kind of award. Robin Ferracone, founder and CEO of Farient Advisors, an executive compensation, performance, and corporate governance advisory firm, doesn’t usually care for moonshots. “They create undue risk-taking,” she says, and they focus too narrowly on the tip-top of company leadership. 

Seventy-five public company executives have received awards with a grant date value of $100 million or more since 2018. Of the recipients, only 11 do not have the title of CEO, chair, or founder, according to Equilar data.

“One of the reasons I didn’t really like the Elon Musk award is that he can’t do it by himself. If he’s trying to get those big things done, he’s got to have a team doing it,” Ferracone says. 

What’s more, a January analysis of moonshot packages, reported by the Wall Street Journal, found that they rarely deliver the outsize returns they’re intended to spur. (While Musk and Smith made good on their moonshot deals and earned billions, Xu is far from unlocking the upper tranches of his package.) 

In the same boat as Zuckerberg

But Meta’s program is unique in that it covers multiple executives. “This recognizes it’s a broader group that has to get this done,” Ferracone says. 

The group of six certainly has a lot to do, and the new compensation program spreads the accountability around. Meta is racing to reinvent itself as an AI‑first company, pouring tens of billions into custom chips, data centers, and AI researchers to build frontier models and deliver on the promise of AI “superintelligence.” Meta estimates its capital expenditures could reach $135 billion this year, most of which will fund AI initiatives. Zuckerberg is expecting AI to transform how Meta’s workforce operates, enabling fewer employees to get more done. He has already overseen the flattening of teams and is reportedly developing a personal AI agent to assist with his own work. 

The stock options send a clear message to his leadership team, Ferracone says: “Figure out how to take advantage of AI and make it value-creating, and do it in the next five years.”

Make no mistake: The buck still stops with Zuckerberg. But as founder-CEO with a roughly 13% economic stake in the company, his fortune—pegged at $187 billion at Friday’s close—is already inextricably tied to Meta’s. 

“He’s got so much riding on this through his ownership,” Ferracone says. “And so this is a way to get [other executives] in the boat with him.”

Meta’s stock options may represent a new chapter in the AI-era talent war that’s already seen top technologists command nine-figure pay deals, with Meta among the top spenders. 

And just as Elon Musk’s initial moonshot package spawned a whole class of copycats (including Musk’s more recent $1 trillion plan), Ferracone expects other tech companies to mimic Meta’s latest move. “With technology companies, there’s kind of a lemmings mentality,” says Ferracone. “They really follow one another, and so I’m expecting to see more of these.”