SpaceX weighs buying data from troubled startups to train its AI models

SpaceX has held informal internal talks about buying customer and operational records from troubled or defunct startups to train its AI models, Bloomberg reported. The buyer would be SpaceXAI, whose training of Grok on European users’ posts has been under statutory inquiry in Ireland since April 2025.

SpaceX has held internal discussions about buying customer and operational records from troubled or defunct startups to train its AI models, Bloomberg reported. The talks are informal and may not produce a deal.

The unit is SpaceXAI, formerly xAI. It wants cheap operational data and customer information to feed Grok. SpaceX did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment.

The template is Google’s $10M offer for the records of the collapsed airline Spirit, which was later topped by a counterbid. That archive held 100 million emails and 500 million Teams messages.

The difference is that SpaceXAI is describing a method rather than bidding at one auction.

It is also a change of direction. The unit has trained Grok on posts from X and on in-house specialists it calls AI tutors. Hiring for that team was paused in June and a Starlink staffer, Jack Garabedian, has since taken it over.

A dead company’s customer list is a different kind of data with a different kind of history.

In Europe it is also a different kind of risk. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission opened an inquiry in April 2025 into whether EU and EEA users’ public posts were lawfully processed to train the Grok models. It had already used emergency High Court powers against X the previous August.

The question the regulator asked then is the question a purchase would raise again.

Musk has been open about the wider ambition. “We are going to be training Grok on the sum total of all SpaceX information,” he told staff in August, according to Bloomberg. He added that it would be trained on them.

That covers his own employees. Buying a failed startup covers other companies’ customers.

SpaceXAI’s European privacy notice says it relies on legitimate interests to improve its models, and names a US entity as the controller for European users. All processing happens in American data centres.

Under the European Data Protection Board’s 2024 opinion, that basis turns partly on what people would reasonably expect. A customer of a company that no longer exists has no expectations about Grok.

Consent does not travel with a database either. The buyer becomes a new controller and has to find its own lawful basis, which is a harder problem than price. SpaceXAI’s record on data it gathered itself is already mixed, having asked staff for tax returns in exchange for $420 and not paid.