The Genetic Data Fire Sale: The 23andMe Bankruptcy Crisis

Maybe you did it at a holiday party. Or maybe someone gave it to you as a gift.

You spit in a tube, mailed it off, and a few weeks later got back a colorful breakdown of your ancestry. Turns out you’re 23% Scandinavian. You have a genetic marker associated with slightly elevated Alzheimer’s risk, plus you found a third cousin you didn’t know existed.

It was fun. Illuminating, even. You agreed to the terms of service. Well, you clicked “I agree” without reading all 47 pages. But who actually reads those?

You figured your data was safe. This is a legitimate company. They went public. They have privacy policies. Surely they know what they’re doing with the literal blueprint of your biological existence, right?

… Right?

Then October 2023 happened.

Someone on Reddit posted that they were selling 23andMe customer profiles. Not just a handful. I’m talking about 6.9 million profiles ^[1], organized by ethnicity. Ashkenazi Jewish customers grouped together. Chinese ancestry profiles bundled and priced. Your genetic information, sorted like inventory at a warehouse and offered on the dark web.

The company confirmed it: hackers had spent five months credential-stuffing their way into customer accounts, using stolen passwords from other data breaches to systematically try logging in until they found matches ^[1]. Undetected, they downloaded data and scraped family connections. They specifically targeted certain ethnic groups and advertised that fact like it was a feature.

You got an email from 23andMe. They were very sorry. They’d launched an investigation. They recommended you enable two-factor authentication (which, you might notice, they’d never required before, weird how that works). There was a class action lawsuit brewing.

But money doesn’t un-breach your genome.

And then, in March 2025, you got another email. This one was different.

23andMe was filing for bankruptcy ^[2].

That fun ancestry report you got? The one with the genetic health screening and the family connections? The company that generated it was now worth less than $50 million, down from a $6 billion peak ^[3]. And when companies go bankrupt, they liquidate assets to pay creditors.

Your DNA? That’s an asset now.

Your genetic profile, along with those of approximately 15 million other customers, just became part of the company’s liquidation inventory ^[4]. All of it went to the auction block, available to pharmaceutical companies and research institutes. Whoever could pay the most, really.

Here’s what makes this different: unlike a credit card number or password, you cannot reset your genome. If your DNA data gets sold to an entity with different privacy standards, that exposure is permanent. And it doesn’t just affect you. It affects your children, your siblings, your parents, your long lost cousins. None of whom ever consented to any of this.

So when 23andMe declared bankruptcy in 2025, millions of customers faced an impossible question: can a company legally auction off your genetic information when it goes under?

The answer reveals just how broken privacy protection really is in America. And honestly? You’re going to hate it.

When Your Spit Sample Becomes Liquidation Currency

23andMe’s trajectory reads like a cautionary tale about what happens when business models meet biology.

The company launched in 2006 with an almost utopian pitch from co-founder Anne Wojcicki: democratize genetic testing and help people understand their ancestry while advancing research into human genomics. She convinced millions to mail in their saliva samples with promises of privacy and scientific progress.

By 2021, when 23andMe went public via a SPAC merger, it looked like a triumph. The at-home DNA testing market was booming. Customers were fascinated by ancestry breakdowns. The company had built a database that pharmaceutical researchers desperately wanted access to, plus genetic health reports that felt genuinely useful.

But here’s the problem with genetic testing as a business: you only need to do it once. Your DNA doesn’t change. There’s no subscription model for re-sequencing the same genome. The company tried pivoting into therapeutics, but none of it gained real traction. The stock price collapsed 98% from its peak ^[3].

Then came the security nightmare.