This paper demonstrates the significance of others in experiencing meaningful work for elite professionals, in this case that is, professionals who work for societal challenges through technical solutions. An ethnographic field study shows how an elite professional identity is maintained by working with others in what we term a ‘cold collective’. The cold collective is a different than usual form of achieving meaningfulness with others at work; not by engaging in friendly and social work relations, but rather by engaging in relations based on competences, knowledge, and expertise. We show how the boundaries of the cold collective to which elite professionals relate are temporally and spatially fluctuating and dispersed by nature, which implies that relations among elite professional identities as processes must continuously be renegotiated with others. These findings build on the emerging bridge between the literatures on meaningful work and professional identity work and add more detailed accounts to the meaning of unity with others in the quest for meaningful work. By doing so, we widen the current understandings of what peers as significant others mean for experiencing work as meaningful among elite professionals.