An IIT Bombay grad’s rejected pay package is going viral, and the real number is even bigger

A viral social media post about an IIT Bombay graduate’s career choices has been circulating widely, and the person at the center of it says the numbers people are sharing are actually too small.

The post described Rishabh Agarwal, who scored AIR 33 in JEE and completed his B.Tech in Computer Science at IIT Bombay, as someone who worked at Google Brain, DeepMind, Waymo, and Meta Superintelligence Labs before turning down a $1 million job offer personally extended by Mark Zuckerberg to instead build his own company, Periodic Labs.

Responding to the resurfaced claim, Agarwal clarified that the offer “was an order of magnitude higher than $1 million” — suggesting the real figure he walked away from was substantially larger than what went viral. The original post had pegged the offer at roughly ₹9.5 crore per annum, made after five months at Meta, before Agarwal quit to co-found Periodic Labs.

Agarwal announced his exit from Meta last August, calling it a “tough decision” to take a different kind of risk. Periodic Labs, backed by Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA, is building an AI scientist designed to generate hypotheses for real-world experiments that could help discover new materials, medicines, and even new physics.