Google (GOOG) just paid US$10 million for a dead airline's emails. I think some companies are sitting on undervalued data goldmines, just waiting to strike a deal. But which can monetize it without going broke?

📧 Dead airline, live data: Google paid US$10 million for a bankrupt airline's data.📚 Skeptical of the hype: One author calls RELX (REL) an undervalued data goldmine.
💬 Comments into cash: Another values Reddit (RDDT) 96% higher on its AI data.

Google just won a bankruptcy auction for the internal data of Spirit Airlines, the collapsed budget carrier, and paid US$10 million for it. This included around 100 million employee emails, 500 million Teams messages, spreadsheets, pricing models, and operations records. The purchase is yet another bid to get an edge on AI.

What Spirit’s data offers is an insight into how a real company operates behind the scenes, and that messy internal record is exactly the thing you can't scrape off the open internet.

If a bankrupt airline's emails fetch US$10 million, what is the data sitting inside the healthy companies you own actually worth? The market rarely puts a number on the decades of proprietary data locked in their systems, and that information is quickly becoming valuable in the eyes of data-hungry model builders.

However, there’s a catch… the richest data (customer records, health data, etc.) is often exactly what privacy laws bar from being sold. Plenty of data-rich companies may never earn a cent because of this. The beneficiaries will be the ones that can dig it up without digging themselves into a hole.

What company do you think is sitting on a treasure trove of data?