--- title: "Spirit Airlines' last asset went on the block: the inbox of everyone who worked there" description: "The bankrupt airline's 80,000 email accounts, 500 million internal messages and a million time cards drew a $10 million Google bid and a $12.5 million counter. The flight attendants' union and more than 100 members of Congress are still trying to stop the sale of the workers' own records." publisher: "The Inference" section: "Model" published: 2026-11-08T14:05:30.691Z modified: 2026-11-08T14:05:30.691Z canonical: https://theinference.org/article/spirit-airlines-last-asset-went-on-the-block-the-inbox-of-everyone-who-worked-there language: en keywords: "AI Training Data, Privacy, Bankruptcy, Google, Labor, Spirit Airlines" --- # Spirit Airlines' last asset went on the block: the inbox of everyone who worked there > The bankrupt airline's 80,000 email accounts, 500 million internal messages and a million time cards drew a $10 million Google bid and a $12.5 million counter. The flight attendants' union and more than 100 members of Congress are still trying to stop the sale of the workers' own records. When a company dies, its desks, routes and trademarks go to auction. Its inbox now goes too. Bankrupt Spirit Airlines [put 80,000 email accounts, 500 million internal messages, 20.6 million SharePoint files and a million time-card records up for sale](https://www.wired.com/story/ai-companies-really-really-want-to-buy-your-work-files-and-emails/), and Google bid $10 million for the lot as AI training material [1]. Micro1, a rival data broker, [topped that with $12.5 million](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/panic-builds-over-bankrupt-spirits-looming-data-sale-to-google/) [1][2]. As of November 3 the sale is still being contested, and the people fighting it are not the airline [3]. They are the flight attendants who wrote the email [3]. *Chart: **The price ladder of the workflow-data trade** Bar chart comparing four reported price points in the AI workflow-data trade: $1,000 for one writer's story, $2 million for one worker's files, $10 million Google's Spirit bid, $12.5 million Micro1's counterbid.* *Reported price points in the market for human workflow data, in US dollars, on different scales from one document to one company's corpus. Sources: WIRED Backchannel (6 Nov 2026), Ars Technica (10 Sep 2026). [1][2]* ## The money is bigger than one bankruptcy [Mercor](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/mercor), the three-year-old company WIRED calls the industry leader in buying companies' live workflow, was reported in August to be weighing a round at a $20 billion valuation, with [Nvidia](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/nvidia) considering an investment [4]. Trajectory, an 18-person post-training startup, raised a $45 million Series A at a $300 million valuation in November and names Mercor among its customers [8]. Micro1's chief executive Ali Ansari says buyers already pay about $40 to $50 billion a year for data, and that within two to four years the trade will pass a trillion dollars annually [1]. WIRED could not verify that claim, and neither figure comes from an audited filing [1]. Treat it as a broker's forecast. Even discounted, the direction is the point: data centers get the headlines, but the quiet money now bids for the paper trail of ordinary work. ## The complication is who writes the paper The workers whose emails, transcripts and time cards feed the models are the same workers the models are built to replace. The president of the flight attendants' union, Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, says the data "became valuable in the age of AI in order to train models to replace jobs" [3]. On the supply side the same pattern shows in miniature: one writer in r/mercor_ai says [Mercor let her go mid-task](https://theinference.org/article/mercor-cut-at-least-50-staff-by-two-sentence-email-and-its-ceo-says-that-was-not-a-layoff) and [never paid for work she had already recorded](https://old.reddit.com/r/mercor_ai/comments/1xm5u7e/scammed_by_mercor/) [5]; another post in a Mercor workers' forum says the company does pay, eventually, even after pauses [6]. The brokers pay the workers once, in wages, and sell the record of their work forever. ## The other side is winning rounds The court-appointed privacy ombudsman in the Spirit case [recommended approving the Google sale on October 5](https://thenextweb.com/news/google-spirit-airlines-data-ombudsman-approval/), after passenger booking records were excluded and a third party, Tonic.ai, was hired to scrub the corporate email [7]. [Google](https://theinference.org/markets/companies/alphabet) says it is not buying any personal information at all [2]. But the ombudsman did not assess the risk to employees, and on November 3 [more than 100 members of Congress joined the union in demanding payroll records, time cards and some employee communications be cut from the sale](https://www.webcenterfairbanks.com/2026/11/03/flight-attendants-union-congress-members-seek-privacy-protections-spirit-data-sale-google/) [3]. De-identification is a promise about math, and the union's position is that a workflow dataset keeps its value precisely because the people in it remain traceable. ## A ruling here sets the price of every inbox If the court approves the sale with time cards included, every bankruptcy becomes a data liquidation, and Ansari's trillion-dollar forecast gets cheaper to believe. The trade for readers with money in the listed AI names: the labs' budgets quietly assume this corpus stays cheap and legal, and that assumption is now being litigated, one flight attendant's inbox at a time. Your inbox is not a byproduct of your job. It is the product. ## Takeaway Whether the court lets Spirit's time cards and inboxes go to Google for $10 million will set the template for how the workflow-data trade prices and clears workers' own records. ## Sources 1. [WIRED, Backchannel (Steven Levy and Lauren Goode), 'AI Companies Really, Really Want to Buy Your Work Files and Emails', 6 November 2026](https://www.wired.com/story/ai-companies-really-really-want-to-buy-your-work-files-and-emails/) 2. [Ars Technica (Ashley Belanger), 'Panic builds over bankrupt Spirit's looming data sale to Google', 10 September 2026](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/panic-builds-over-bankrupt-spirits-looming-data-sale-to-google/) 3. [InvestigateTV via KTVF (Caresse Jackman), 'Flight attendants union, Congress members seek privacy protections in Spirit data sale to Google', 3 November 2026](https://www.webcenterfairbanks.com/2026/11/03/flight-attendants-union-congress-members-seek-privacy-protections-spirit-data-sale-google/) 4. [PYMNTS, 'Nvidia Weighs Investment in Round Valuing Mercor at $20 Billion', 19 August 2026](https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2026/nvidia-weighs-investment-in-round-valuing-mercor-at-20-billion/) 5. [Reddit r/mercor_ai, 'Scammed by Mercor', 5 November 2026](https://old.reddit.com/r/mercor_ai/comments/1xm5u7e/scammed_by_mercor/) 6. [Reddit r/mercorai_workers, 'Mercor Always pays in the end', 7 November 2026](https://old.reddit.com/r/mercorai_workers/comments/1xq145f/mercor_always_pays_in_the_end/) 7. [The Next Web (Ana Maria Constantin), 'Spirit's privacy ombudsman backs Google's $10m data deal', 9 October 2026](https://thenextweb.com/news/google-spirit-airlines-data-ombudsman-approval/) 8. [TechCrunch via lavx.hu, 'Trajectory raises $45M to make AI model training accessible to nontechnical experts', 3 November 2026](https://news.lavx.hu/article/trajectory-raises-45m-to-make-ai-model-training-accessible-to-nontechnical-experts-techcrunch) --- Spirit Airlines' last asset went on the block: the inbox of everyone who worked there — The Inference. Canonical: https://theinference.org/article/spirit-airlines-last-asset-went-on-the-block-the-inbox-of-everyone-who-worked-there