"Data is the new oil" has been a marketing line for twenty years, repeated in keynotes and believed by almost nobody who actually works with data. Then Spirit Airlines went bankrupt, and its 100 million employee emails and 500 million Teams chats got auctioned off next to the planes and the headquarters, Google paying $10 million to win it. Not because the data got more valuable — because, for the first time, someone had to price it. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/18/business/google-spirit-airlines-data