Inside the Hackquisition Era

In the summer of 2025, something strange happened in Silicon Valley. OpenAI was about to close a $3 billion acquisition of Windsurf, a promising AI coding startup. The deal had been months in the making, terms were agreed, and celebration champagne was already on ice. Then, suddenly, it all fell apart.

Within 48 hours, Google swooped in with a different offer: $2.4 billion—not to buy the company, but to “hire” its CEO and entire engineering team.

Welcome to the era of the hackquisition, where the world’s most powerful tech companies have discovered a loophole in the traditional M&A playbook. When you can’t acquire a company due to antitrust concerns, you hire all the employees and license their technology.

Same outcome, different paperwork.

The New Rules of Empire Building

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