23andMe Re-Opens Data Auction With $305 Million Bid From Former CEO

After a brief court dispute, 23andMe and all its assets are up for auction once again. The second time around, former CEO Amy Wojcicki has started out hot with an opening bid nearly $50 million higher than the previous auction’s winner.

Last month, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals purchased the bankrupt 23andMe for $256 million, beating out Wojcicki’s nonprofit, TTAM Research Institute’s opening bid by over $100 million. However, Wojcicki quickly requested that a U.S. judge reopen the auction. In her filing, Wojcicki argued that 23andMe’s advisors capped her maximum bid at $250 million due to concerns about TTAM’s “financial wherewithal.”

Now, Wojcicki says she has the additional backing of an unnamed Fortune 500 company valued at over $400 billion. On Wednesday, all parties involved reached a compromise in federal court, according to Bloomberg, which allowed Wojcicki to reopen the process with a $305 million bid. Now, Regeneron can counter with an offer of at least $315 million. After that, Wojcicki gets another bid and then Regeneron can respond with the auction’s final offer.

The downfall of 23andMe has been fascinating to watch. Once valued at $6 billion, 23andMe filed for bankruptcy in March after its worth plummeted to nearly $0. Pinpointing the exact cause of 23andMe’s collapse is hard. You can easily argue that it was inevitable given the limits of its original concept. Although the company tried finding other ways to generate profit, nothing really worked. For example, last year, the Washington Post reported that 23andMe’s attempt to launch a subscription service with personalized reports and advice bombed.

However, 23andMe’s massive 2023 data breach certainly didn’t help its survival. Hackers were able to obtain information about 6.9 million people, including names, birth years, relationship labels, family names, and locations. 23andMe took five months to notice the hack, two months to publicly admit its true severity, and even tried placing the blame on customers. (Per Bloomberg, 23andMe is trying to resolve claims from a class action lawsuit related to the data breach as part of the bankruptcy.)

Personally, I think it’s silly to trust any company within the consumer DNA testing industry. If you have a similar view, you’re likely not super affected by 23andMe’s bankruptcy. So, you might not care about the ongoing auction. However, the fact that it’s even allowed to proceed at all is concerning.

What’s ultimately up for sale right now is 23andMe’s database of over 15 million people’s DNA. When the auction was first announced, California’s Attorney General urged people to request that 23andMe delete their data and lawmakers opened an investigation stating that with “the lack of a federal comprehensive data privacy and security law, we write to express our great concern about the safety of Americans’ most sensitive personal information.”

Under 23andMe’s privacy policy, your information is deleted upon request. Whichever bidder wins the auction has agreed to comply with the existing promise. But no one who used 23andMe’s products explicitly agreed to be part of this trade deal. The sale of something as sensitive as DNA, which you cannot change like a password or an email address, should require more than implicit consent. In other words, it shouldn’t be up to an individual to opt out by requesting their data to be deleted. Without explicit permission from each person in that database, the sale shouldn’t be allowed to go on at all.