15 Million People's DNA Went Up for Auction

23andMe collapsed into bankruptcy and the DNA of 15 million people went up for auction. The genetic data breach, the bankruptcy, and who owns it now. In 2007, a startup threw a party in Manhattan where guests spat into tubes that cost 999 dollars. Barry Diller hosted. Rupert Murdoch attended. Sergey Brin wandered the room in blue Crocs pretending to be the photographer, and his wife Anne Wojcicki was the CEO collecting the samples. When the kits shipped, roughly 80 percent of customers ticked a box agreeing to let their genetic data be used for research. That box was the entire company. 23andMe never turned a profit in 19 years. The kits were never the business. In 2015 Wojcicki hired Genentech's Richard Scheller to build a drug division before the company had even reached a million customers, and in 2018 GlaxoSmithKline paid 300 million dollars for exclusive access to the DNA database. The drugs never arrived. The losses did. 666 million dollars in fiscal 2024 alone. Then the breach. In October 2023, a hacker calling himself Golem used passwords stolen from other sites to get into about 14,000 accounts. Through the DNA Relatives feature, those 14,000 accounts exposed 6.9 million people. Golem sorted the profiles by ethnicity and sold them on BreachForums, including a list of over a million people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent and 300,000 users of Chinese heritage. 23andMe blamed customers for reusing passwords, quietly rewrote its arbitration clause, and settled a class action for 30 million dollars. In September 2024 the entire independent board resigned on the same day. In March 2025 the company filed for Chapter 11. Regeneron won the database at auction for 256 million dollars, more than 40 state attorneys general moved to block the transfer, and Regeneron walked away. Wojcicki bought it back through a nonprofit called TTAM Research Institute for 305 million dollars, then renamed it 23andMe Research Institute. Same data, same founder, less oversight than before. Gattaca imagined a private genetic database that decided who you were allowed to be. It was fiction because the database did not exist. Fifteen million people built it voluntarily, at parties, and paid for the privilege. Power isn't built on innovation. It's built on data. And ruin begins the moment our data can go up for auction. Sources and verification list in the pinned comment. If a claim in this video matters to you, check it yourself. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📩 Power & Ruin Collapse Playbook Investigating 200+ Companies with Bonus Theranos Case File : → news.powerandruin.com/subscribe ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ About Power & Ruin Power & Ruin investigates the psychology behind companies, movements, and belief systems that reshaped the world, and why their collapse was inevitable. Cinematic deep-dives into fraud, corporate failure, and the psychology of power. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CHAPTERS 0:00 The DNA of 15 Million People 0:53 23andMe Files For Bankruptcy 1:24 The 2008 Spit Party: Diller, Murdoch, Weinstein 2:54 The Research Checkbox That Built The Database 3:48 Inside The 23andMe Terms of Service 5:36 Gattaca And The Private Genetic Database 7:10 19 Years Without A Profit 7:45 The GlaxoSmithKline DNA Deal 9:50 23andMe Plus And A $666 Million Loss 11:18 The Entire Board Resigns 11:45 Chapter 11 And The Regeneron Bid 12:44 TTAM Buys The Database Back 14:47 Golem: 23andMe Data Breach 18:37 Congress, The FBI, And 23andMe's Response 21:17 You Paid To Become Inventory