Spirit Airlines shut down in the early hours of Saturday morning. By that evening, one superfan was already trying to save it.
“We could buy Spirit Airlines,” Hunter Peterson, a voice actor who once flew Spirit Airlines for 24 hours straight, said with excitement in an Instagram post.
“This started as a joke and this is rapidly going out of control in the best possible way,” he said in another post.
By “we,” Peterson meant everyday people, including former employees and passengers. He is calling his movement Spirit 2.0 and is encouraging people to come together to purchase the airline before private equity does.
“Private equity is already circling the wreckage. But before they lock it up, there is a narrow window for something that has never happened in commercial aviation. The passengers, the workers, and the communities Spirit served can take it back,” he wrote on the Spirit 2.0 website.
Millions of people have viewed Peterson’s social media posts laying out his idea and visited the website, which he says he built in an hour and which, incidentally, keeps crashing.
A banner at the top of the website reads: “The people can own it.”
The idea is a page from the Green Bay Packers’ playbook. The Packers are the only publicly owned, nonprofit team in the NFL. Rather than a single billionaire owner, the team is owned by 538,967 stockholders.
“No billionaire can move the team. No hedge fund can gut it for parts,” Peterson writes on the website, referring to the Packers model. “Spirit 2.0 is that model — applied to aviation, for the first time in American history.”
Peterson began accepting non-binding pledges of intent from interested folks. He has received pledges totaling almost $23 million from 36,605 people as of Sunday afternoon. Spirit 2.0 has not collected any actual money yet.
That’s a long way from the likely value of the now-defunct airline. Peterson is targeting commitments of $1.7 billion. JetBlue tried to acquire Spirit Airlines in 2022 for about $3.8 billion before antitrust regulators shut it down.
“Register your intent to contribute — starting at $45. No money moves yet. This is your declaration that you want in before the window closes,” the website says. “Together we demonstrate the collective will and capital to make a serious bid before private equity locks it up.”
Spirit Airlines was known for its ultra-low costs and served passengers across the United States for 34 years.
The airline’s collapse came after a tumultuous few years riddled by furloughs, layoffs, merger drama, pay cuts, bankruptcies and — most recently — a failed $500 million federal bailout from the Trump administration. The airline’s collapse affects about 17,000 employees, and many passengers were left scrambling to book new flights.
Other airlines jumped at the opportunity to help stranded Spirit Airlines passengers. United Airlines is offering price-capped tickets to travelers who had to cancel their flights at the last minute, and American Airlines is offering capped fares on routes overlapping with Spirit Airlines.
Peterson, who is calling himself the potential new CEO of Spirit Airlines, said he is surprised that what started as a lark has struck a nerve with so many people.
“I’m genuinely crashing out right now,” he said in an Instagram post detailing the response he’s received so far.
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