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On Tuesday, what remains of Spirit Airlines is being picked apart in bankruptcy court. Aircraft lenders are repossessing those bright yellow airplanes while the major U.S. carriers jockey for the rest of the assets, like gates. But some fans of Spirit aren\u2019t ready to give up yet.<\/p>\n
Hunter Peterson, a 22-year-old voice actor for video games like Hyrule Warriors, posted a TikTok shortly after Spirit announced it was ceasing operations on Saturday, with a pitch for all of America: \u201cWe could buy Spirit Airlines.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s 250 million adults in the country. Peterson said if only 20% of them paid $30 to $40 each, that would be enough to save the ultra-budget airline. The video quickly went viral, and by Saturday night, Peterson stood up letsbuyspirit.com, which he said crashed under its own traffic soon after. By Tuesday morning, it claimed $132 million in (nonbinding) pledges from more than 156,000 people, with a target raise of $1.75 billion.<\/p>\n
The site has an interesting, quite populist framing. \u201cPrivate equity is already circling the wreckage,\u201d it reads. \u201cThe passengers, the workers, and the communities Spirit served can take it back. Like the Green Bay Packers. Like WinCo Foods. Like us.\u201d The minimum pledge is $45, roughly the cost of a one-way Spirit ticket, the site claims. Every member would get one vote, the site says, and the profits would be distributed proportionally.<\/p>\n
The pitch is fighting a nonexistent villain. Private equity isn\u2019t involved with Spirit\u2019s downfall. No one\u2014not Frontier, which tried twice to merge with it, and neither the Trump administration nor any venture fund\u2014wanted to buy the airline at the price its creditors needed. Spirit\u2019s CEO cheekily told CNBC on Monday that \u201cwe just kind of ran out of runway.\u201d<\/p>\n
Spirit is dissolving, and it told the bankruptcy court this week it doesn\u2019t even have enough cash to host an organized auction of its own aircraft and engines. Instead it\u2019s opting to let the lenders take back the planes.<\/p>\n
The two examples that Peterson invokes, the Green Bay Packers and WinCo Foods, aren\u2019t the best fits. The Packers are the only publicly owned franchise in major American sports, but only because the team was grandfathered in before the NFL banned the structure in 1960. A share of Packers stock now confers no equity, has no payout, and can\u2019t be traded; it\u2019s more sentimental than financial. WinCo is an ESOP (employee stock ownership plan) in which the company itself, not the employees, makes all the contributions. Neither model translates directly onto a community of strangers pledging $45 each over the internet for a piece of a defunct airline.<\/p>\n
Peterson told Yahoo News he wouldn\u2019t be speaking to any publications until he had talked to his lawyer. He didn\u2019t respond to Fortune\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n
Though the premise of Peterson\u2019s pitch might be faulty, the voice actor is tapping into a real phenomenon. Spirit was the airline that Americans loved to hate. It was the punch line of many comedians\u2019 jokes for its bright yellow planes, the seats that don\u2019t recline, and all the excessive fees. Though that might work in Europe, it failed in the U.S. But despite all those quirks, Spirit was the people\u2019s champion, the airline that kept American air travel cheap.<\/p>\n
When Spirit entered a route, fares dropped across the board. Economists call it the Spirit Effect, and it\u2019s real: The Department of Transportation has documented for years that just the presence of an ultra-low-cost carrier on a given city pair pushes other fares down by double-digit percentages. Without Spirit, as William McGee at the American Economic Liberties Project told NPR, \u201ceveryone will be paying more.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the part Peterson\u2019s pitch is, in its own scrambled way, trying to get at. The four largest U.S. airlines now control roughly 80% of domestic capacity. Spirit, even at its diminished end-state, was still the eighth-largest carrier in the country. Its disappearance is the latest in a long history of consolidations\u2014Northwest into Delta, US Airways into American, Continental into United, Virgin America into Alaska\u2014that have left Americans with fewer choices for flights, and higher prices for those. Spirit\u2019s own CEO, Dave Davis, told CNBC on Monday that more consolidation is \u201cwhat the lower end of the industry needs.\u201d<\/p>\n
#viral #TikTok #bid #save #Spirit #Airlines #fighting #wrong #villain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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