At xAI's Palo Alto headquarters, engineers cheered. It was February 2, and they'd just received a memo from Elon Musk , informing them the AI startup would be acquired by his rocket company, SpaceX. In a Slack channel for the team that trains the company's chatbot Grok , memes flowed, and a few changed their profile pictures to depict themselves as astronauts. The excitement was quickly overshadowed by the pressure building inside the startup racing to catch up with rivals like OpenAI and