You know the acqui-hire playbook. Big company buys startup, keeps the team, sunsets the product. The team is the asset — the technology is just the excuse to wire the money.

SpaceX flipped that script. On April 1, SpaceX confidentially filed for an IPO — initial target: $1.75 trillion. By April 8, Bloomberg reported the number floating above $2 trillion in early investor conversations. The plan: raise up to $75 billion with a 30% retail allocation — three to six times what's normal. If June goes to plan, this surpasses Saudi Aramco's 2019 debut as the largest public offering in history.

Baked into that number is xAI, Musk's AI division and the house that Grok built. All 11 original co-founders walked out by March 28. But the IPO filing forces a question that matters more than the departures themselves: what do the financials look like without them?

The price tag

The prospectus puts numbers on xAI for the first time. Last quarter before the SpaceX merger: $107 million in revenue against $1.4 billion in losses. A billion dollars burned every three months. At a $2 trillion combined valuation, investors pay over 80 times forward revenue. For context: Nvidia trades at 20x. Apple at 8.8x.

Grok 5 — the next-generation model meant to justify these multiples — missed its Q1 2026 training deadline. It now targets Q2. The model reportedly runs 6 trillion parameters on a MoE architecture (mixture of experts — activates only a fraction of its parameters per task to save compute). None of this appears in xAI's official release notes.

The departure ledger

The exits unraveled over eighteen months. Igor Babuschkin left in 2024. Christian Szegedy followed in early 2025. February 2026 broke like a dam: Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba departed February 10–11. Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, and Toby Pohlen left the same month. xAI had appointed Pohlen to lead "Project Macrohard" — an AI agent designed to automate white-collar work. He left weeks after the appointment. xAI paused the project.

By early March, Guodong Zhang and Zihang Dai were gone. Manuel Kroiss (pretraining lead) and Ross Nordeen walked out March 27–28. Roughly a dozen senior engineers followed. Every architect, every pretraining lead, every researcher who designed the system — gone.

Musk's response, March 16: "xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up." Replacements include recruits from Cursor, the AI coding editor.

The power bill

What SpaceX did get is hardware. Colossus 2, xAI's Memphis datacenter, runs at 1 gigawatt and is expanding to 1.5 GW — enough to power 750,000 homes. In Southaven, Mississippi, xAI installed 27 gas turbines without air quality permits, violating the Clean Air Act. Earthjustice and the Southern Environmental Law Center sued. Mississippi's Permit Board approved 41 permanent turbines in March, but on April 9, the NAACP and local coalitions filed an appeal. "Data centers cannot be built on the backs of at-risk communities," said Abre' Conner, the NAACP's Director of Environmental and Climate Justice.

The lawsuits are active. The expansion continues regardless.

What this means for you

If you're a developer evaluating platform bets, the xAI API works today. Grok exists, the enterprise tier exists, the pricing undercuts competitors. But platform stability isn't just uptime — it's whether the people who understand the system's internals are still around when things break. Every co-founder departure is institutional memory walking out the door.

If you're watching the IPO, the question is arithmetic: at 80x revenue with a billion-dollar quarterly burn, what are you buying? Not the team — they left. Not a shipping roadmap — xAI paused Macrohard and Grok 5 is late.

The classic acqui-hire assumed the talent was the asset. SpaceX rewrote the playbook: the datacenter is the asset. Come June, public markets decide whether 1.5 gigawatts without the people who know how to use it is worth two trillion dollars — or just the world's most expensive electricity bill.