It’s probably a VC fundraising strategy, “Meta gave me 100s of millions so you should give me more”.

It helps when they hand you comically large sacks with dollar signs on them

I wonder if the 100 million dollar guys got a signing bonus like athletes. Just take 10 mill and chuck up deuces.

Those people are intelligent, they’re just selfish and have no qualms over making money off the repugnant crap they’re doing.

In that case, how come they "left in the first days of the job" because "they saw what they were going to work on and peaced out"?

They may have found that the work they were called upon to perform was worse than what they'd been led to expect. Maybe much worse.

With the amount of money Facebook was offering I could see them having a hard time refusing. If someone offered me 100 million dollars to work on AI I know I would have a hard time refusing.