Micro1 Topped Google's $10 Million Bid for Spirit Airlines' Emails. The Sale Is on Hold.

Micro1, a startup that sells training data to AI labs, reportedly bid $12.5 million for bankrupt Spirit Airlines’ email and message archive, and a union fight has put the sale on hold.

The bids put a price on one company’s old email: $10 million from Google and, reportedly, $12.5 million from Micro1. The union and privacy groups contest whether stripping names makes those messages safe to sell, and a company weighing a license would face the same question before any price applies.

What is up for sale?

Spirit stopped flying on May 2, and its bankruptcy estate is selling what remains. The asset schedule lists about 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams items. Google won the August auction at $10 million, with Mercor, another data supplier, next at $7.5 million, court records show.

Micro1 then filed notice of a competing bid, which the docket describes as superior to Google’s. The offer is reportedly $12.5 million, a 25% premium, with a proposal to exclude sensitive employment material. The court-appointed consumer privacy ombudsman has asked for time to review Micro1’s plan to anonymize the data itself rather than hire an independent party.

Why is the sale on hold?

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA objected in court. The union says the sale would include payroll records, emails and Teams messages, and that removing names does not make their contents confidential. It also says the agreement keeps the links between records, so identifiable people could be reconstructed in a group Spirit’s size.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center and a law professor filed a brief backing the union. Their brief argues that the agreement spells out protections for consumer data, not employee data,.

Google says it is not buying personal information from Spirit, and that such data will be excluded or de-identified by an independent third party before it receives anything. More than 100 members of Congress have asked that payroll records, timecards and some employee communications be left out.

The ombudsman recommended approval on Oct. 5 but said she had not assessed risks to employees. No sale has won approval. The hearing, adjourned five times, was last set for Nov. 6, and Spirit is working with objectors on employee information.

What does the price say about the market?

SimpleClosure, which sells the assets of shut-down startups, puts typical payments at $10,000 to $100,000 per company, CEO Dori Yona has said. By The Denominator’s arithmetic, Google’s $10 million is 100 to 1,000 times those payments.

Brokers are pitching operating companies too. One broker’s cold email to a newsroom claimed that AI labs pay $350,000 to $1.8 million as a one-time fee for old documents, emails, Slack messages and tickets.

The test for a company with years of employee email and chat: what would its own license have to clear before any broker’s price applies?