Elon Musk’s SpaceX is reportedly in talks to buy customer and operational data from defunct and struggling startups, a move that could feed the training of its Grok AI models.
Bloomberg reports that any data SpaceX does acquire would reportedly go to xAI, the SpaceX subsidiary that owns and develops Grok.
Musk’s xAI already trains Grok on posts from X, the social media platform that falls under the same corporate umbrella, unless users opt out. Buying data from shuttered companies would give it another source of training material.
Breitbart News previously reported that Google bought the data of defunct Spirit Airlines to train its Gemini AI:
Google has said it intends to use the data to train its AI large language models. According to court records, the purchase includes 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 7.2 billion records tracking competitors’ flights, and 7.5 billion passenger transaction records dating back to 2008.
It also covers more than 175,000 employee records from as far back as 1986. Beyond these figures, Google will gain access to information on revenue, aircraft operations, employee productivity, audits and fraud investigations, marketing campaigns, human resources files, project management records, and pricing curve data.
Grok currently trails models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta on multiple metrics, and SpaceX has been spending heavily to close the gap. The company reportedly spent nearly $15.8 billion on AI development last quarter.
xAI’s current flagship model is Grok 4.6. The company plans to release Grok 4.7 this month, with Grok 5 due later this year.
Musk laid out his ambitions for Grok 5 during SpaceX’s first earnings call last month: “With Grok 5, which should be out before the end of this year, we will be incorporating the entire corpus of SpaceX data.”
He called the scale of that data unprecedented for the company, stating: “Basically, all the data that SpaceX has ever produced, which is a tremendous amount over the course of a quarter century, will be incorporated into Grok training. We think this will make Grok by far the best engineer.”
AI’s insatiable desire for fresh training materials means Americans will face more and more challenges to their privacy as everything we say and do online becomes grist for the training mill — including showing up for work. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Bloomberg here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.