Elon Musk Reportedly Seeking Customer Data From Dead Startups to Train AI
AI needs data to train, and data costs a good penny. Seems like all the user data on X and all the data SpaceX has ever produced hasn’t been enough for Elon Musk’s Grok, because he has a new solution to the conundrum: buying customer data from defunct companies for cheap. Left scrabbling for data, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is allegedly thinking about buying the customer and operational data left behind by struggling or bankrupt startups, according to sources who spoke with Bloomberg.
- ▪AI needs data to train, and data costs a good penny.
- ▪Seems like all the user data on X and all the data SpaceX has ever produced hasn’t been enough for Elon Musk’s Grok, because he has a new solution to the conundrum: buying customer data from defunct companies for cheap.
- ▪Left scrabbling for data, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is allegedly thinking about buying the customer and operational data left behind by struggling or bankrupt startups, according to sources who spoke with Bloomberg.
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| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-reportedly-seeking-customer-data-from-dead-startups-to-train-ai-2000813451 |
| Publication time | Thu, 17 Sep 2026 22:35:15 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-17T22:38:44.520Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-17T22:38:44.520Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | xg33KnBWsI-x · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI needs data to train, and data costs a good penny. Seems like all the user data on X and all the data SpaceX has ever produced hasn’t been enough for Elon Musk’s Grok, because he has a new solution to the conundrum: buying customer data from defunct companies for cheap. Left scrabbling for data, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is allegedly thinking about buying the customer and operational data left behind by struggling or bankrupt startups, according to sources who spoke with Bloomberg. SpaceX needs cheaper data options, fast. In its first earnings report last month, SpaceX announced a whopping $15.8 billion commitment to its AI efforts, even though the company’s AI division xAI ended the quarter with a $1.3 billion net operating loss.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.
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