SpaceX mulls buying data from troubled startups to train its AI models

SpaceX is reportedly exploring the purchase of customer data from troubled startups as a cheaper source for training and improving its AI models.

Looking to gain an edge over its AI competitors in the cut-throat AI market, SpaceX has now sought to capture data from a new source. As per a new report from Bloomberg, SpaceX has held internal discussions about purchasing customer data from troubled and defunct startups. The plan here is to secure a more affordable data source to improve its artificial intelligence models.

The report suggests that the communications between the teams have been informal at best and may not even lead to a deal, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg on the condition of anonymity. The approach here is being echoed as similar to Google’s offer to buy business data from Spirit Airlines for AI training purposes after the discount carrier shut down its operations. In the past, Alphabet Inc. had made a $10 million bid that raised data privacy concerns, including from former flight attendants.

While Musk seeks to train his models on social media posts and other data sources that reveal all eventualities of human behaviour, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has taken issue with this approach. It opened an inquiry in April 2025 into whether EU and EEA users’ public posts were being processed to train the Grok models. It had used its jurisdiction against X in the previous August.

The European privacy notice says that it relies on legitimate interests to improve its models and names a US entity as the controller for European users. All processing happens in American data centres.

According to X’s public pages, X shares your data with xAI, which is then used to train Grok. That public data includes public posts, engagements, reports, conversations on Spaces, profile information and any interactions you may have with Grok itself. Users can opt out of model training and Grok personalisation, delete conversation history and make their account private.

Open Settings > Privacy and safety > Grok and Third-party collaborations