Customer data in bankruptcy: RadioShack to 23andMe

The 2025 winner was TTAM Research Institute, the nonprofit run by Anne Wojcicki, who co-founded 23andMe. Its $305M took nearly all of the company's assets, ahead of Regeneron at $256M, and Judge Brian C. Walsh signed the order.

Ahead of approval, 27 states plus DC went to court to block any sale of customers' genetic data without consent. Most of those disputes were settled before the hearing, though several states kept objecting.

RadioShack's IP package went to General Wireless for $26M in 2015. As first proposed, the deal included more than 67M postal addresses and 8.5M email addresses, and state attorneys general, Texas first among them, objected.

The privacy ombudsman then ran a nine-hour mediation. The outcome: no Social Security, phone, birth date or card numbers went to the buyer, and emails were limited to customers who had requested product information within the prior two years. The FTC also wanted the buyer to work in the same line of business and stick to RadioShack's privacy policy.

In December 2023 Zulily handed itself to an assignee under an ABC (an out-of-court liquidation). Its website, domains, trademarks, social accounts, software and a customer database were then bought by Beyond for $4.5M plus costs.

Overstock paid $21.5M in 2023 for Bed Bath & Beyond's intellectual property and digital assets, including business data.

A customer file is worth money because you can market to those customers again. AI buyers care about something else entirely: the way employees write, plan, escalate problems and make calls. Several buyers say they remove names and personal details before licensing, and some refuse sensitive HR and health files outright.

That changes the privacy questions, though it does not remove them, as the Spirit objections show.