I flew Spirit once; Charleston to Las Vegas, because it was the only nonstop and I have a weakness for not changing planes.

A friend of mine — also a client — took the option from ATL to LAS for the same conference. We compared notes afterward and landed on the same phrase independently. It's a bus in the sky; a Greyhound at 30,000 feet with a yellow paint job and a beverage cart that runs your card.

Spirit charged for the carry-on. The seat assignment. Printing a boarding pass at the counter. The water. Anything that could be unbundled had a price, and the price usually hovered around $59.

Then on May 2nd of this year, the airline stopped flying. Thirty-four years, eight point one billion in debt, seventeen thousand people out of work, every scheduled flight canceled at once.

And this week, in bankruptcy court, they finally put a number on the one thing they never thought to charge for.

Google bid $10 million for Spirit's data.

That's not much, and the smallness is the whole story. In the same proceedings JetBlue paid $58.5 million for the LaGuardia slots. A hedge fund paid $93 million for the Florida headquarters. The building where people made the decisions went for nine times the record of the decisions themselves.

What Google bought was the inside of the company. Roughly a hundred million internal emails. Five hundred million Teams messages. Seventeen million OneDrive items. The finance systems, the operations systems, the revenue management systems. Payroll records and employee tax forms. The pricing models. The booking curves.

The record of how the work actually got done.

A third party will scrub the personal information before Google receives any of it, using the California standard even where California law wouldn't necessarily apply. Spirit keeps the right to sell the customer list separately, to buyers in travel and hospitality.

Google said plainly what it wants with it: improving its products and its AI models. An AI company was the backup bidder at $7.5 million. Two sophisticated buyers, bidding against each other, over the operating exhaust of a dead airline.

They priced something most firms haven't.

You hold the same asset. Years and years of it.

Every client conversation. Every service request and how it got resolved. Every decision, every exception, every account that moved and the reason it moved. Your version of booking curves.

Google settled the question of whether that's worth money to somebody. The open question is whether you own yours.

Every vendor you work with is shipping AI right now. Your CRM has one. Your portfolio system has one. Your custodian has one. Your planning software has one.

Each of them sees exactly one slice of your firm.

So you end up with fifteen assistants, each answering with total confidence about one-fifteenth of your business. Ask the question you actually have — the one that starts in the CRM, runs through the portfolio system, and ends at the custodian — and all fifteen come up short.

The models are capable enough. The limit is that nobody holds the whole picture, and the people closest to holding it work somewhere else.

This is where "we're doing AI" quietly becomes "our vendors are doing AI, and we're hoping some of it helps us."

You need a control layer. You need one place where your data lands, where you decide what's true, where permissions get enforced, and where AI gets its access.

With that layer, everything compounds. Every source you connect makes every agent better, and the intelligence you build belongs to you.

Without it, every AI project restarts from zero and stops at whatever your vendor exposed this quarter, at whatever price they set for it.

Here's a test. If you fired every vendor tomorrow morning, what would you still have?

I doubt any of us are going to be Spirit Airlines. Thank goodness.

But the people who apply value to firms like yours are getting sophisticated about these issues. Diligence used to be AUM, client retention, and the org chart. Increasingly it's show me your data. Show me it's clean. Show me you own it. Show me the business doesn't live in three people's heads.

The firms that have this sorted are worth more. Materially more. If that matters to you, I think we should talk.

Jud

Episode 158: This week on Next Mile, Kyle Van Pelt is joined by Michael Batnick, Managing Partner at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Michael began his career in sales at a life insurance company. Today, he focuses on helping clients navigate the challenges of long-term investing and achieve their financial goals.

Michael talks with Kyle about how AI is disrupting the wealth management industry. He discusses the realities of rising technology spending, the limits of AI-driven efficiency in human relationships, and how firms can use AI to improve advisor training. Michael also shares the concept behind Exhibit A—Ritholtz's custom-branded visual storytelling and charting software platform—and the importance of building intuitive technology that genuinely makes people's lives easier.

In this episode:

(00:00) - Intro

(02:26) - Navigating AI hype vs. operational realities 

(04:24) - Michael's thoughts on technology spending

(07:01) - Why AI won't systematically double an advisor's client capacity

(11:21) - How AI could transform training for young advisors 

(15:57) - Private equity and the changing advisor landscape 

(19:24) - The debate between cash flow and enterprise value 

(23:09) - The concept behind Exhibit A

(25:52) - Are RIAs becoming wirehouses in disguise? 

(28:32) - Why large RIAs struggle to reach the public markets 

(31:19) - Michael's outlook for the wealth management industry 

(32:38) - The future of multi-custodial RIAs 

(35:23) - Michael's Milemarker Minute

Milemarker on the Road
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Jud Mackrill