When Spirit Airlines shut down overnight Saturday — canceling all flights, letting go of 17,000 employees, and telling ticketholders to just not come to the airport — people were flabbergasted but also bereft. For all its indignities, Spirit was cheap. Then one of them had an idea.
Hunter Peterson, a voice actor with frequent flyer grievances, posted a TikTok asking: what if 20% of American adults chipped in the price of a Spirit fare and just . . . bought it? He called it “Spirit 2.0: Owned by the People.” Within hours he’d thrown up a website — a janky, one-hour job, by his own admission — and by Sunday, 36,000 “founding patrons” had pledged nearly $23 million, crashing his servers in the process.
None of it is real money. These are non-binding pledges. Also worth noting: the actual cost of acquiring and relaunching an airline runs into the billions. Peterson knows this. In a video posted earlier today, he winkingly tried recruiting aviation lawyers, PR people, and lawyers with a one-word ask: “Help?”
“I know what I don’t know,” he told his followers, but “you’re committing to this bit, so I’m committing to this bit.”