# Spirit Airlines' data bids: what $7.5M, $10M and $12.5M actually establish https://licensethedata.com/blog/spirit-airlines-data-bids/ Court filings document competing offers for deidentified records. They do not establish a completed payout or a price comparable for a small business. Published 2026-10-14. 4 minute read. ## Three amounts, three precisely named stages Spirit's August 14, 2026 auction notice identifies Google LLC as the successful bidder with $10 million total consideration and Mercor.io Corporation as the alternate bidder with $7.5 million. The notice expressly makes the transaction subject to court approval. It attaches forms of sale agreements, not evidence that funds have reached the seller. In a September 3, 2026 filing, micro1 proposes a competing $12.5 million cash purchase of the deidentified data. Fortune's September 14 report describes the competing amounts. These sources document bids and a proposal, not proof of closing or payment. This article uses historical August and September evidence; it does not claim those bids were made during our October research run. - Google: successful bidder selected at the August auction, subject to approval. - Mercor: alternate bidder at that auction. - micro1: subsequently proposed competing purchase. Source: Court auction notice, docket 1463, pages 1–2 — https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/In-RE-Spirit-Aviation-Bankruptcy-Notice-of-Auction-Results-8-14-26.pdf Source: micro1 competing-bid notice, docket 1556, pages 1–3 — https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/In-RE-Spirit-Aviation-Holdings-Micro1-Competing-Bid-9-3-26.pdf Source: Fortune: competing Spirit data bids, September 14 — https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/micro1-tries-to-beat-googles-bid-to-buy-bankrupt-spirit-airlines-data-for-12-5-million-highlighting-value-of-data-to-ai-companies/ ## A large bankruptcy corpus is not an SMB valuation The auction concerns a specific deidentified-data asset in Spirit's bankruptcy proceeding. Neither filing supplies a per-employee, per-document or per-year price schedule for other companies. Nor does it establish which provider offers the best net terms to an ordinary operating-business seller. The narrow inference is that several counterparties expressed priced interest in this particular asset. Our recommendation is to use that as evidence that operating records can attract commercial interest, while keeping the dataset, transaction stage and proposed rights visible. It is not a forecast for your support tickets, CRM history or internal wiki. Source: Court auction notice: specific deidentified-data sale — https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/In-RE-Spirit-Aviation-Bankruptcy-Notice-of-Auction-Results-8-14-26.pdf ## The diligence story is as important as the price micro1's filing describes pending objections concerning employee-record confidentiality and vendor intellectual property. It proposes exclusions for sensitive employment material, restrictions on profiling and onward transfer, independent sample review and an airline-operations field-of-use restriction. Those are a bidder's descriptions and proposed protections, not findings that every concern was resolved or terms that apply to every micro1 partnership. For an owner, the useful questions are concrete: whose information is in the archive, whose IP is embedded in it, which downstream uses are permitted and who can require exclusions? Deidentifying names does not by itself answer ownership, employee confidentiality or a vendor's contractual rights. Ask your advisers to review those issues for your actual records and jurisdiction. - Map employee, customer and third-party rights separately. - Ask about prohibited uses and downstream recipients, not just removal of names. - Record sample-review and exclusion rights before transfer. - Do not copy a bankruptcy bid's proposed clauses as universal legal protection. Source: micro1 bid: objections and proposed protections, pages 2–6 — https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/In-RE-Spirit-Aviation-Holdings-Micro1-Competing-Bid-9-3-26.pdf ## What would upgrade a bid into payment evidence? A later approval order, executed closing documentation and evidence of funds received would answer different questions from these notices. We did not establish subsequent closing or receipt in this research pass. Do not read that limitation as a claim that the transaction never closed, or that its September status remains current. Keep a transaction's stages separate: expression of interest, bid, selected bidder, approval, execution, delivery and payment. A provider-hosted claim of completed transactions or aggregate rights-holder payouts can be relevant context, but it does not replace named seller evidence or a representative payout distribution.