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Google bid $10 million for 600 million messages sent by Spirit Airlines employees
A bankruptcy auction put a dead airline's internal chat in front of Gemini, and the flight attendants' union has stalled it by arguing that deidentification standards cover consumers only. SpaceX is reportedly looking for similar data.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Gizmodo, citing sources who spoke with Bloomberg, reports that SpaceX is considering buying the customer and operational data left behind by struggling or bankrupt startups to feed its AI work.
- Those talks are informal, according to Gizmodo, and may not produce a deal at all.
- At a bankruptcy auction last month, Google bid $10 million for the data of Spirit Airlines, to be used to train its Gemini models.
- The lot covered aircraft operations and employee productivity data, 1 million time-card records, 17 million OneDrive items, and hundreds of thousands of employee records.
- The bankruptcy court has since postponed approval of the purchase.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure The people whose records are in the Spirit lot are not parties to the sale; their representation is a union filing made on their behalf.
- decision Anyone buying software from a company that may not survive the year now has a signing-time choice about assignment of data, because once a company files, the approval that counts happens in bankruptcy court.
- precedent A $10 million clearing bid gives the next distressed estate a comparable to quote, and Gizmodo says intermediaries for these sales already exist.
Somewhere in the Spirit Airlines estate is a Teams message from one flight attendant to another about staffing, and it is now part of a lot a court is being asked to approve for sale [7][11]. The people in that file are employees, not customers. Passenger information was left out of the package, while employee tax forms, employment contracts and litigation files were included [7][8].
Google offered $10 million [6]. The email and chat alone come to 600 million items [14]. That works out to about 1.7 cents a message, before counting the 17 million individually owned OneDrive items and the million time-card records bundled with them [15][8].
Set that against what the buyers spend elsewhere. SpaceX put a $15.8 billion commitment to AI in its first earnings report last month, and xAI closed the quarter with a $1.3 billion net operating loss [3][4]. The commitment is 1,580 times the size of the Spirit bid [16]. Grok 5 is due before the end of the year, and Musk has claimed it will reach AGI-level [5].
Google said the data would be scrubbed of personally identifiable information [9]. The union filing spells out what it says survives a scrub. "A pseudonymized dataset can still disclose which crew bases generated grievances, how a small subset of flight attendants performed on recurrent training, which employees were subject to investigation, what compensation adjustments followed which events, and what employees said to one another about management, staffing, or their union," the objection stated [11].
Here the endgame is being settled in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, with a union as the party speaking for the people in the records [10].
Two questions decide this for a customer, and they are separate. One is whether the data can be assigned to a buyer who was never your counterparty. The other is whether the deidentification a buyer promises protects everyone in the file or only the consumers a standard covers [10]. Employee chat and HR files come out badly on both: the data can be assigned, and the deidentification standard covers consumers, not employees. Gizmodo reports that facilitating failed companies' sale of employee data to AI labs has become a niche market of its own [13].
What to watch
- Whether the Southern District of New York court approves the Spirit sale as filed, trims the lot, or imposes a stricter deidentification standard on employee records.
- Whether SpaceX's informal talks turn into a signed purchase, and whether any seller tells its own customers before closing.
- Whether the next estate to auction internal data asks for more than the $10 million Spirit price.