SpaceX Is Shopping Customer Data From Failed Startups to Feed Elon Musk's AI Ambitions

SpaceX has been quietly talking about buying customer files from failed startups to feed Elon Musk's AI models.

People familiar with the conversations told Bloomberg the talks are informal and may never become a deal. SpaceX did not respond. The buyer would be SpaceXAI, the unit formerly known as xAI. The target is customer and operational records from struggling, bankrupt, or dead startups, described as cheap relative to other training data.

An industry parallel, not a SpaceX purchase, is Google's roughly $10 million bid at Spirit Airlines' bankruptcy auction for business records that included about 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages. That archive also held employee productivity files, OneDrive items, and time-card records. It did not include passenger personal information.

The purpose is to train Grok-class models and close the gap with rivals. On SpaceX's first earnings call last month, Musk said Grok 5 is targeted before year-end and would incorporate "the entire corpus of SpaceX data" so Grok becomes "by far the best engineer." He told staff in August they would train Grok on "the sum total of all SpaceX information."

Ireland's Data Protection Commission has been running a statutory inquiry since April 2025 into whether EU and EEA users' public posts were lawfully processed to train Grok. SpaceXAI's European privacy notice relies on legitimate interests and names a US controller, with processing in American data centres. Consent given to a startup does not automatically travel with a sold database. The buyer would become a new controller and would need its own lawful basis.

SpaceX's recent AI commitment sits around $15.8 billion. The AI division ended that quarter with a $1.3 billion net operating loss.

The same training-data fight is already visible in reporting that OpenAI contractors have been reading live ChatGPT conversations.