When Spirit Airlines closed Saturday night, it canceled all flights, laid off 17,000 employees and suspended ticket holders. don’t come to the airport — People were shocked but at the same time felt a sense of loss. For all its indignities, Spirit was a cheap product. Then one person had a great idea.
Hunter Peterson, a voice actor with a frequent flyer complaint, posted the following question on TikTok: 20% of U.S. adults cut Spirit fares . . . Did you buy it? He called it “Spirit 2.0: The people own it.” Within hours, he had the website up (a one-hour job, by his own admission), and by Sunday, 36,000 “founding backers” had pledged nearly $23 million, crashing his servers in the process.
None of that is real money. This is a non-binding commitment. Also worth noting is that the actual cost of acquiring and restarting an airline runs into the billions of dollars. Peterson knows this. In a video released this morning, he attempted to recruit aviation lawyers, publicists and attorneys with a wink and a single word: “Please help.”
He told his followers, “I know what I don’t know.” But he said, “Since you guys are focusing on this, I’m also focusing on this.”
