Elon Musk’s SpaceX has held informal internal discussions about buying customer and operational information from troubled or defunct startups to train its artificial intelligence models more cheaply, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The talks are inside SpaceXAI — the company’s AI unit, formerly known as xAI — and may never produce a deal. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. The approach would echo Google’s reported bid to purchase business data from Spirit Airlines for AI training after the carrier wound down operations — a $10 million offer that drew privacy pushback from former employees.
SpaceXAI has largely trained Grok on posts from social network X and on in-house “AI tutors.” Turning to outside customer databases would mark a shift as the firm races Anthropic and OpenAI for enterprise customers. Musk recently told SpaceX staff that Grok would also be trained on “the sum total of all SpaceX information,” including employees. Hiring for AI tutors was paused earlier this year; Starlink veteran Jack Garabedian now leads the data team after a leadership swap.
Sources: Bloomberg; The Straits Times
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