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Google paid $10M last week for the operating file of a company that no longer exists. That number will outlive the story it came from.

Spirit Airlines shut down on May 2, halfway through its second Chapter 11 in two years, carrying about $8.1B in debt and putting roughly 17K people out of work. The estate has been liquidating since. In July a court signed off on 22 LaGuardia takeoff and landing slots to JetBlue for $58.5M. That sale was routine, because gates at LaGuardia have been trading for decades and everyone in the room knew the range.

The data lot had no range. The August 14 notice out of the Southern District of New York itemizes what Google bought: 100M emails, 500M Microsoft Teams chats and collaboration records, around 30M lines of code along with the software models and algorithms behind it, pricing on 7.2 billion competitor flights, 7.5B passenger transaction records going back to 2008, and more than 175K employee records dating to 1986. The marketing, HR, strategy, audit and fraud files came with it. Passenger records were excluded, and Google says a third party will scrub personally identifiable data before the handover, which I would want verified rather than assumed.

So $10M buys the complete operating record of an $8 billion airline going back nearly two decades, including how it set prices and what its fraud team caught. No going concern would sell that at any price, which is why the only way to acquire one is to wait for the company to fail.

Google's public statement described acquiring part of an enterprise dataset that can be helpful in improving its products and AI models. Whatever you make of the phrasing, the creditors got $10M and the bankruptcy bar got a comparable it did not have a month ago.

A comparable now exists, and every distressed retail and commerce company is carrying an asset nobody has been assigning a value to. The next liquidation will have someone in the room asking what the internal record is worth, and the answer will not be $10M, because Google will not be bidding alone. Being early and unopposed is most of what it bought.

The exposure runs the other way for companies still operating. Your Teams history and your pricing engine survive the business, and Chapter 11 protects neither. Retention policies were written to limit discovery exposure in litigation. I have not seen one written to govern what an estate can auction to a competitor's AI lab, and that hole has been open the whole time.

Spirit's creditors took the only bid they had, from the only buyer who had done the arithmetic. Whether $10M was a steal depends on what a second bidder would have paid, and there was no second bidder.

Christine Hunsicker was sentenced to five years for securities fraud. She raised money for CaaStle on invented paperwork for six years before anyone stopped her.

The forgery was caught in 2023 by an auditor doing routine work, and an explanation about a Princeton lecture was enough to close it.

Money kept arriving for another eighteen months. Nobody has explained why the firms that wired it never made the same call.