Erik Prince Sells Xe Services (formerly Blackwater), Rebranded as Academi with John Ashcroft on Board

Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) was acquired by a group of private investors and renamed Academi, with Erik Prince exiting the company he founded. The acquisition and rebranding represented the second major corporate transformation designed to distance the entity from Blackwater’s documented war crimes, contractor impunity, and systematic accountability failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. A group of private investors purchased the company’s North Carolina training site for a reported $200 million in 2010, with the full corporate reorganization completing in 2011.

Academi’s Board of Directors included politically powerful figures designed to provide legitimacy and access to government contracts: former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former White House Counsel and Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Jack Quinn, retired Admiral and former NSA Director Bobby Ray Inman, and Texas businessman Red McCombs. The board composition demonstrated a systematic strategy of recruiting former senior government officials to rehabilitate the company’s reputation and maintain access to classified contracts despite the entity’s history as Blackwater.

The presence of John Ashcroft—who as Attorney General during the early Iraq War period oversaw the Justice Department when legal frameworks for contractor immunity were established—created profound conflicts of interest. Ashcroft’s board role at the successor to Blackwater meant the former Attorney General who helped create the legal environment enabling contractor impunity now personally profited from the private military corporation that most exploited those immunity provisions. Similarly, Jack Quinn’s service as Vice President Al Gore’s Chief of Staff and White House Counsel provided bipartisan political cover for the rebranded entity.

Prince’s exit from day-to-day operations allowed him to claim distance from ongoing controversies while retaining financial benefits from the sale. The transaction occurred as the four Blackwater contractors convicted of manslaughter in the Nisour Square massacre faced sentencing, allowing Prince to avoid personal association with the legal consequences of Blackwater’s operations while monetizing the company he built on $2 billion in government contracts.

The Academi transformation completed the pattern established with the Xe Services rebranding: when Blackwater became too toxic, rebrand as Xe Services; when Xe Services faced continued scrutiny, sell to investors and rebrand as Academi with politically connected directors. Each transformation allowed the essential business model—providing privatized military force to government agencies beyond traditional accountability mechanisms—to continue operating while evading consequences for systematic violence and legal violations. The strategy demonstrated how private military corporations could use sequential corporate restructurings to outlast and frustrate oversight, investigation, and enforcement actions.