Updated October 2026
What is in Spirit Airlines' data archive?
If you are sizing up a company's own archive, Spirit Airlines is the largest public example. The court filings describe the airline's offered data as a Microsoft 365 estate: about 100M emails across 80,000 accounts, 500M Teams items, 17,082,644 OneDrive items, 20,577,677 SharePoint items and 175,658 employee records dating from August 1986.1
Inventory
Counting the records
Those counts come from the flight attendants' objection (Dkt. 1489), which is the most detailed inventory in the docket. Press figures differ slightly: MIT Technology Review describes 100M emails, 500M Teams messages and 176,000 employee records, and iTnews uses the same rounded numbers.1,2
Spread across 80,000 mailboxes, about 100M emails is an average of roughly 1,250 messages per account. That is our arithmetic, and the real spread is uneven: an airline's operations staff, crew schedulers and managers write far more than a seasonal agent.1
| Fact | Value and source |
|---|---|
| Spirit archive size in the filings | About 100M emails across 80,000 accounts; 17,082,644 OneDrive items; 20,577,677 SharePoint items; 500M Teams items; 175,658 employee records dating from August 1986 |
| What the Spirit Airlines archive holds | About 100M emails, 500M Microsoft Teams messages and 176,000 employee records |
What was cut
Five datasets Google agreed to leave behind
On 2026-09-09 Google agreed to remove the passenger name records and transaction data, refunds, inflight and onboard purchases, timecard information and WiFi sales. Its $10.0M price did not change. Those are the customer-facing and payroll-adjacent sets; the communications archive stayed in.3,4
Other parties asked for more to come out. The flight attendants asked that their information be excluded or restricted, International Aero Engines said its confidential material is not estate property, and the pilots' union said safety-program data could identify pilots.5,6
Why buyers want it
Why a dead airline's inbox is worth eight figures
AI buyers are not after passenger lists. They want the written record of how work gets done: who asks for what, how a problem is escalated, how a decision is reached. Buyers' own lists show it: SOPs and internal docs, project history, email and chat, CRM and billing records, tickets and task histories.7,8,9,10
In Spirit, how the data would be cleaned mattered as much as the money. A filing after the auction said the way personal details are stripped out, and other privacy factors, may decide the outcome, and the ombudsman's recommendation relies on Tonic.ai certifying that work before each transfer.11,12
Your archive
Holding your own records up against Spirit's
Most companies hold a small fraction of this, which is why typical prices are far lower: SimpleClosure's wind-down data deals usually run $10K-$100K. The same tools show up, though. SimpleClosure says Slack is present in 95% of the workspaces it evaluates, Google Drive in 87% and GitHub in 82%. For an operating company, the ranges buyers publish mostly run $100K to $2M as their own claims, and the match quiz shows which buyers take an archive like yours.13,14,15,16,17
FAQ
Questions, answered with sources
About 100M emails across 80,000 accounts, according to the inventory in the flight attendants' objection.1
Google agreed to remove the passenger name and transaction records, refunds, inflight purchases and WiFi sales on 2026-09-09.3
Every business is different, so this one is best talked through with the buyer you're working with. Their team goes over it with you before anything is signed.
Before you sign
Questions to talk through with your buyer
Every business is different, so these are best talked through with the buyer you're working with. Their team goes over them with you before anything is signed.
Questions for this kind of business
- Which of our datasets would you leave out, the way Google left out passenger and timecard data?
- How do CCPA, GDPR, UK GDPR and state privacy laws apply, and is de-identified data still personal information?
- How are employee data, union contracts and NLRA questions handled?
- Do customer, vendor or platform contracts, NDAs or API terms restrict this?
Questions for any buyer
- Is the license exclusive, and for how long?
- Can you sublicense the data, and to whom?
- Which AI labs will receive it, and will you tell us?
- How long do you keep it, and how is it deleted?
- What is your liability cap, and who indemnifies whom?
- Will the contract ban re-identification of people in the data?
- Who removes personal data, by what method, and do we approve it first?