Elon Musk's SpaceX has held internal discussions about purchasing the leftover customer files of startups that have already gone under—not licensing data from operating businesses that could say no, but buying the digital estate of companies that no longer exist to object.

The talks are taking place inside SpaceXAI, the artificial intelligence division formed in February when SpaceX merged with xAI. People familiar with the discussions told B that they are informal and may lead nowhere.

Still, the idea amounts to cheap fuel for Grok. AI models learn from training data—the text, code, and records an algorithm studies to get better at predicting what comes next—and high-quality material, meaning real business records rather than scraped web pages, is becoming expensive. A defunct company's file cabinet is, by comparison, a bargain.

Google has already gone down this road. The search giant paid $10 million in a bankruptcy auction for the internal records of Spirit Airlines, the discount carrier that shut down for good this year, according to Decrypt. The haul included roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, and decades of employee files, all headed into an AI training pipeline.

That data belonged to real employees who signed up for a job, not an AI experiment. A flight attendants' union objected in bankruptcy court, arguing that scrubbing names from records—what companies call "de-identifying" data—does not stop someone from piecing together who said what across a decade of internal chats. That court fight remains ongoing.

Under Chapter 11, the bankruptcy process that lets a failing company liquidate its assets to pay off debt, a customer database is treated the same way as office furniture: it is auctioned to the highest bidder. Nobody asks the customers, because by the time the gavel drops, there is no company left for them to complain to.

SpaceXAI is seeking operational data and customer information from startups in exactly that position, so it can keep training Grok on how real businesses actually run.

The company has also turned inward. In August, Musk told a SpaceX all-hands meeting that the firm would go beyond buying outside data and mine its own records. "It will inherit your thoughts," Musk reportedly told employees, according to Fortune.

Musk framed that as a feature rather than a bug, telling staff to think of themselves as raising the model, since it would absorb their outlook along with their work. He did not specify which categories of employee data would actually be used, or how.

SpaceX released Grok 4.5 in July as its first model since the xAI merger closed, per Decrypt. In the immediate future, the company also has a second Musk-owned deal—the $60 billion acquisition of Cursor—and a delayed new version of Grok on the agenda. The outcome of the Spirit Airlines court fight, and whether SpaceXAI's informal discussions ever turn into actual bids, are the immediate things to watch from here.