Spirit Airlines is (sorry, was) the airline you love to hate but also can’t stop flying because $29 flights exist. On May 2nd, at 3 AM (dramatic timing, very on brand), the iconic yellow budget carrier shut its doors for good after years of financial chaos, a blocked merger, and a Trump bailout that went completely nowhere.
But before the internet could even process the news, influencer Hunter Peterson asked, "What if WE just bought it?" And somehow, impossibly, 124,000 people pledged $88 million over a single weekend. The internet is truly built different, and we have the receipts.
Spirit Airlines made the shock announcement in a 3 AM post that they would be closing their operations for good
Image credits: hbpvo / TikTok
But an influencer saw this as an opportunity to convert the low-budget giant into a publicly owned entity overnight
Spirit Airlines' demise was a spectacular nosedive. After years of losses, a brutal debt load, and a merger with JetBlue that got axed by the Justice Department, Spirit filed for bankruptcy and spent months begging for a lifeline.
Their last hope? A $500 million government bailout from the Trump administration. Trump basically said he was down, but only if he came first, bondholders be damned. The bondholders said absolutely not. Fuel prices kept climbing. And just like that, at 3 AM on May 2nd, Spirit Airlines ceased operations. Flights canceled. Customer service gone. The yellow bird had landed for the last time.
Image credits: hbpvo
He set up a crowdsourcing platform and raised a staggering $88 million overnight from patrons who didn't want to see their favorite yellow planes take a nosedive
Enter TikToker, Hunter Peterson. Content creator. Voice actor. Apparently, accidental airline executive. Less than three hours after Spirit went dark, Peterson posted a video that has since racked up 6.5 million views, and the pitch was genuinely hard to argue with.
There are over 215 million adults in the United States. Take just 20% of them. Ask each one to pledge roughly $30-$40, which is basically the average cost of a Spirit ticket. That's enough to buy the whole airline. "We nationalize Spirit Airlines," Peterson said. "Owned by the people." The internet, already grieving its cheap flights, collectively lost its mind and rushed to pledge its contributions.
Image credits: https://letsbuyspiritair.com/
Image credits: Forsaken Films / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
The website was so popular that it even crashed, and after some upgrades, it continued to raise funds, soon surpassing $130 million
Image credits: hbpvo / TikTok
Experts weighed in, explaining that it might not be so simple, and that the airline was beyond saving
As of May 6th, the pledge website is showing $132 million in total pledges from 133,508 people, with an average pledge of $989. Yes, nearly a thousand dollars per person. What started as, in Peterson's own words, "a joke," has turned into one of the most viral crowdfunding moments the internet has ever seen.
Experts are still firmly in the "this won't work" camp, pointing out that Spirit is deep in formal liquidation and its assets are already being divvied up by bankruptcy courts. But since when has the internet let logic get in the way of a good idea?
This isn't just "hey, send this guy money and he'll buy an airline." Peterson has actually thought this through, and the proposal laid out on his site is more structured than you'd expect from something that started as a viral video. The model he's pitching is essentially a cooperative, so think less "tech startup" and more "the people's airline." And he's got a pretty solid argument for why it could work.
Image credits: Randolph Rojas / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
The voting structure is built on what Peterson calls the Green Bay Packers model. Under the proposal, every verified member gets exactly one vote, regardless of how much they pledged. Dropped $45? One vote. Dropped $45,000? Also one vote. Major decisions like routes, leadership, and strategic direction would be made collectively by the membership. No billionaire in the back quietly steering the plane, so to speak.
The Green Bay Packers are the only non-profit, community-owned franchise in the NFL, and they've been that way since 1923. Instead of one billionaire owner calling all the shots, the team is owned by over 360,000 shareholders spread across the country. No single person can own more than 4% of the team, meaning no one person can swoop in and start making unilateral decisions.
Profit sharing would be proportional to your pledge amount, meaning the more you put in, the bigger your slice of any future returns. He's been careful to flag that this is a proposed model only and nothing is confirmed until lawyers get involved, which, honestly, points to the fact that this guy is taking it seriously and not just vibing into the void.
Image credits: Anton Dios / Magnific (not the actual photo)
The most compelling part of Peterson's pitch might actually be his diagnosis of why Spirit failed in the first place. He argues that Spirit didn't fail because people stopped flying. It failed because Wall Street loaded it with debt and bled it dry. The routes were real. The demand was real. The passengers were there. What wasn't there was ownership that actually cared about keeping the airline alive rather than extracting every dollar from it.
Not everyone is buying a ticket on the hype train. Robert W. Mann Jr., a former airline executive and current president of R.W. Mann and Co., delivered what might be the most polite and thorough way of saying "this is not happening" that we've ever heard. Speaking to USA TODAY, Mann pointed out that if Spirit had any real viable business prospects, someone would have rescued it already.
As for the planes and the staff, they'll survive, just not in yellow. "The planes will come back painted some other way, some of the employees will come back in other uniforms," he said. Basically, Spirit Airlines will live on, just absorbed, rebranded and distributed across the industry. The bones of the airline will be out there somewhere. Just don't expect them to be held together by a viral moment.
You can watch the original video here
People from across the internet rushed to the comment section to pledge allegiance to the Spirit gods, hoping to cash in on a piece of the pie
