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They Want to Buy Spirit Airlines Back. And They Have Already Raised $88 Million.
Days after Spirit Airlines collapsed overnight, a grassroots movement led by a content creator has raised tens of millions in pledges to turn it into a community-owned airline before private equity moves in.
Photo by David Syphers
At 3:00 in the morning on May 2nd, one of America's most recognizable airlines went dark.
No warning for passengers mid-trip. No deal reached. Just a message on the website that all flights were canceled and customer service was no longer available. Spirit Airlines had started an orderly wind-down of operations, effective immediately.
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17,000 workers lost their jobs. 44 million annual passengers lost their carrier. And private equity firms began circling the wreckage.
Then a TikTok video changed the conversation entirely.
Content creator Hunter Peterson posted a proposal for a collective buyout of Spirit's assets within hours of the shutdown. Less than three hours after that, he launched letsbuyspiritair.com. The site crashed almost immediately from the volume of traffic.
By the time servers were restored, the number was already staggering.
Tens of thousands had registered non-binding pledges totaling more than $88 million. An Instagram account for Spirit 2.0 amassed over 163,000 followers within days.
This is not just nostalgia for a budget airline. Something bigger is being proposed here.
Spirit 2.0 is modeled after the Green Bay Packers ownership structure. Every verified member gets one equal vote on major decisions regardless of pledge size. Profit-sharing dividends scale with pledge amount. Workers receive equity through an employee stock ownership plan. Executive pay would be capped and tied to median worker compensation.
One member. One vote. Profits shared by all. No shareholders to answer to.
The minimum pledge is $45. That number was chosen deliberately. It represents the average price of a one-way Spirit ticket.
If you have followed this far, here is the part worth slowing down on.
Spirit did not collapse because nobody was flying it. Supporters argue the airline's failure was not due to lack of customers but financial exploitation that left it saddled with unsustainable debt. The airline filed for bankruptcy twice since 2024, and a last-ditch $500 million government bailout collapsed when bondholders rejected the proposal at the eleventh hour.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called Spirit's CEO personally to say there was no deal. The government wanted up to a 90% stake in exchange for the cash infusion. Bondholders refused.
The people who flew Spirit every week had no seat at that table. Spirit 2.0 is an attempt to change that permanently.
The skeptics are not wrong to raise questions. The airline industry remains notoriously volatile with razor-thin margins, fluctuating fuel costs, labor shortages and intense competition. Even carriers backed by major investment firms regularly struggle during downturns.
Running a community-owned airline in that environment is genuinely difficult. There is no precedent for it in American aviation.
But there is also no precedent for $88 million in grassroots pledges appearing within days of an airline's collapse. Spirit flew more than 50,000 people in its final day of operations alone. The demand was real. The market was real. The people who needed those $45 tickets are still out there.
Peterson's pitch is simple math. With 250 million US adults, a 20% participation rate at the average Spirit fare could fund the acquisition entirely.
Whether that math survives contact with aviation regulators, bankruptcy courts and the actual cost of running an airline is the question nobody has answered yet.
What is already clear is that the people who built their travel lives around Spirit are not ready to let private equity write the final chapter.
The gates went dark at 3 in the morning. The response came before sunrise.
Editor's Note: The Spirit 2.0 campaign reflects a growing frustration with how financial decisions made in boardrooms ripple out to workers and everyday travelers. Whether the movement can translate grassroots momentum into a functioning airline remains to be seen, but the speed and scale of the response signals something the industry would be unwise to ignore.
