That doesn't entirely get by the acquisition test. Google acquired the HTC smartphone design team for $1.1 billion.

See https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16949366/google-htc-smart...

The first Pixel phone was released in 2016. Your linked article is dated 2018.

It does also say: "Google worked with a subset of its new HTC hires on a contract basis for the Pixel and Pixel 2".

This suggests they at least partially outsourced the work initially and then acqui-hired their way into in-housing it.

Though, yes, it is possible that some of it was done in-house from the beginning. Just because they leaned on external resources to some extent doesn't mean they developed no internal capability on their own.

The requirement was financial success, not money pit.