Fundamental problem: Flights don't make money. Airlines actually make all of their money through loyalty programs and credit card payments. They basically should have turned into regulated utilities long ago, but loyalty program revenue saved them.
Unless this initiative will turn into a credit card company (which nobody likes or wants to do) it won't go anywhere
Private equity will likely sell the company for parts. There is no operational improvements for cash flow that they can do.
Or they could actually charge ticket prices that cover the cost of doing business and stop treating their passengers like a it's a time-share sales pitch the whole way.
They can't do this most of the time for a simple economic reason: for most of the year on most routes, supply outstrips demand (i.e., many/most flights on most airlines fly at least a little bit empty). They have to charge fares that customers will be willing to pay, even if that means losing money on a given flight. They can only charge profitable fares on the routes and times of year when demand surges (peak routes, holiday periods, major events). They have to keep their network capacity high enough to satisfy the demand at these peak times, but for most of the year and most of the network, demand is lower, so they have to settle for break-even or loss-minimization.
Consumers only look at bottom line. There is basically two markets with airlines, higher end market with credit cards and premium seating; lower end where consumer solely looks at ticket price.
Because people take "airline X makes $50k profit, and makes $55k off of the credit card, so therefore it makes all money from credit cards" which is true from a certain accounting point of view, and also entirely false, in that it's all accounting tricks and the credit card would be worthless without an airline.
The company is not forced to sell immediately to whoever offers it money, they can sell themselves off for parts.
I heavily doubt PE firms are interested here as there is no potential for growth or a multiple. Spirit's assets are mainly their fleet, there are like 4 maybe 5 people who could buy, of these 2-3 are facing similar financial crises.
In the US I think nobody except United can afford to make a move, more likely some Asian airlines will move; many have grown and have route demand they can't service due to lack of aircraft. If you fly to Asia often you'll note that much of the time Asian airlines have to operate an aircraft from a US airline.
> if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down. The airline industry’s demand for capital ever since that first flight has been insatiable.
I remember reading about how the major airlines now are more of a "bank that happens to have planes," due to the loyalty programs being worth significantly more than the airline. Delta Air Lines earned $8.2 billion from American Express in 2025, surpassing ticket sales revenue. [1]
I primarily use my favorite's airlines credit card because it gives me perks such as priority seating, and free checked bags. I am pretty certain that the credit card fees (that is passed on to the merchant) does not come close to the value that I gain for my credit card loyalty. It is a stupid game that I am forced to play, because the credit cards also provide other benefits, such as fraud protection.
I am wondering right now if "Spirit Air 2.0" even has a fighting chance if they are not able to subsidize operating costs by also being a credit card company.
> The only thing missing is ownership that answers to the people — not to shareholders.
Noble, but this will fail. Why would anyone do this? No incentive.
These sorts of initiatives forget the toil of actually operating a business. You might as well get more pledges given that you'd have more control and the same profit share. It will regress to the same as the status quo.
I pledged $1,000. I have been daydreaming about a customer-owned airline for years now, just about every time I walk through an airport. This might not have much of a chance of succeeding in its purchase of Spirit’s assets, but I’d love to watch things unfold if it did.
> These sorts of initiatives forget the toil of actually operating a business.
For most businesses the size of Spirit Airlines, the owners typically do not operate the business. They pay people to do that. I don’t operate REI, even though I’m one of its many owners.
Thank you. It's nice to have an optimistic comment here amidst all the criticism. Even if the probability of it panning out is low, you'll never hit the pitches you don't swing at.
Not in the USA. Also, the state’s interests often aren’t super well-aligned with the customers’ interests. Too many conflicts of interest for my taste.
Evidence? Isn't the state the expression of the people's will? That's the theory of democracy, isn't it?
Also, any evidence or reason to believe that an extraction-based capitalist model is more aligned with customer interests (where the customer is the thing value is extracted from, and where corporate leadership salaries are directly tied to how much they can grift from the customers) than a government where the incentive is to get the maximum number of happy fliers to vote for you?
Few people know this, but Desjardins, a Canadian financial service cooperative, is hugely popular in the province of Quebec (and also Ontario), and has close to CAD $400 billions in total assets.
I could easily afford any of their competitors but I always picked Spirit airlines. The pricing makes sense, pay more if you need more things. I liked Spirit because it was more akin to riding the bus, I got treated well every time by their staff and the experience was fairly consistent.
Other airlines also have cramped sits, what little they did better than Spirit isn't worth the price, and the experience was inconsistent: some times you'll get nice flight attendants, a comfy plane, and a good check-in/check-out, other times you didn't. can't plan around them. With Spirit I could plan around exactly how bad my experience would be reliably. Just about any inconvenience was some fee away to address it.
Frontier was the cheap airline that just wasn't worth it. On the flip side, AA was overpriced with snobbish (just my experience, very limited) staff. Because it's a "cheap" airline, Spirit came with low expectations, and it only exceeded them to the most part.
I shop at walmart compared to whole foods and other "better" chains for similar reasons. "great value" as walmart's motto goes, it isn't about the price, it's about the value you get for what you pay for. Spirit was the "great value" airline.
I don't think this effort to buy it will prevail, I only wish the GME betters were in on this action. The airline's value hasn't gone away, similar to Gamestop. The people like it, the demand for it there, the airlines assets and staff haven't lost their value. I don't see how it isn't a good investment. This attempt to buy it is to little, too late. but if it came in actual stock purchase agreements, I'm down for it. But donating random cash to some site as a pledge, I don't know about that.
Spirit seemed to enjoy making their customers hate them. everyone who liked Spirit had to explain themselves (like you did) because their reputation was awful. It was a trainwreck of a brand.
The only bad experience I ever had on Spirit was from their garbage passengers, never had a problem with the airline itself, flew them probably 20 times. But then again anecdotal evidence is also garbage, so who knows, maybe we were just lucky. Or maybe a vocal minority made it sound worse than it was.
loved Spirit and flew with them 8 different round trips from BWI to many destinations. So cheap (clothes in bookbag) and never had an issue. They will be missed!
Random side note. Why do many of these (presumably) LLM stamped out sites have the same aesthetic where they all need a pulsating indicator at the top as if to indicate some sort of urgency aesthetic?
Yes, but also one less anything in a highly competitive industry is a bad thing overall. Not saying I think it's a good idea but I seem a grain of reasoning behind it however misleading it might be.
If the industry is already highly competitive, which the US airline market is by any measure, one more marginal carrier accounting for just 3% of passenger miles, makes very little difference.
Spirit was killed by illegal predatory pricing!! There's no reason the corporate criminals who do this stuff would go easy on competition run by different people. The answer is anti-trust enforcement (and related enforcing of the law) and much stronger regulation of businesses in general (if not outright public/government airlines)
Awesome, I hope we see a lot more of this. Co-ops do work, REI is one, Modo is another and we could have many more. Over and over again companies are slowly destroyed by extractive shareholders or PE firms, the current structure of a public company is not the only possible shape.
It’s kinda dumb. They don’t own any planes, and buying the spirit name means the bank/hesge fund gets paid because that’s probably the most valuable piece of property spirit has.
The employees are all gone and shuttered, even if you go try to rehire them they are all jumping to any other company if they stayed to the end. The pilots and cabin crew lost seniority and you won’t be able to afford ALPA union pay or AFA pay.
So while they somehow raised 26 million, it feels like a hollow gesture so that the creditors get paid but not really be realized into an actual airline with an AOC
At 26 million raised it’s actually better to make a new airline and run it lean. Get a good route or two and it could work, but 26 million is lean but doable. The liquidators want to get spirt planes released asap.
I'm not American and I've never flown Spirit Air so can someone explain where all the loyalty to this airline is coming from? Like isn't this another big corp biting the dust?
I could fly from the middle of the USA to Orlando round trip for $90 if I just packed a backpack. Unbeatable value, that’s cheap enough for a spur of the moment weekend trip for the whole family.
For clarity, absolutely nobody did or does this. Spirit is bottom of the barrel cheap - it made flying accessible for many people, who otherwise would not fly (think Ryan air). Absolutely nobody was interstate day tripping, especially on spirt, besides this poster.
So many airline crashes were traced back to “poor company culture” by NTSB that I would never consider flying a company owned by random internet people. Having someone with a lot to lose in charge of things is a feature.
This isn't really a scam because no money moves and this is non-binding. Here are a list of glaring issues I see here:
1) Pledges being non-binding means there is no proof of funds. This means they can't actually make an offer, presumably they will have to email everyone who pledged to put in cash and hope it resembles a solid offer.
2) How much is Spirit worth? Their market cap was ~50M a few days before they shut down. Where are we getting 1.75B$ from?
3) Since these are non-binding pledges I'm inclined to believe most of these numbers are bots / fake. Especially as accredited investors skew older and make up less than 1/5th of the population!
4) 666 is a very specific significant number for the average pledge size to consistently stay at. I've watched the number of patrons go up by thousands and yet the average pledge size stay the exact same. The total pledged is certainly fake as a result, although see [3] pretty sure these are all fake numbers.
5) You get nothing in return for your pledge and definitely nothing in return for your money. They go to great lengths to add disclaimers that everything is proposed and subject to change at their discretion.
6) Just like the entire site is AI slop, the disclaimers are too, not worded correctly like regular financial disclaimers, in many places not required and in other places not good enough.
7) They pretend to care a lot about disclaimers and legal verbiage yet there is no mention of the entity or who is working on this bid so missing the most basic mark when it comes to financial disclosure!
8) It says "Spirit didn't fail because people stopped flying. It failed because Wall Street loaded it with debt and extracted every dollar it could." This is just a lie, no matter how Wall Street trades your stock it doesn't affect your treasury. Spirit failed because of horrible financial mismanagement and both an inability to maintain solvency under operating costs (which rose even further recently due to jet fuel shortages) as well as an inability to secure a line of credit. Technically you could also blame their corporate strategy although this was pretty good with the Jet Blue merger, so blame here also lies directly with Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz (unlikely duo!) for championing blocking the merger. You can find this from a simple Google search or asking your AI of choice.
9) While we're on the subject of financial mismanagement, whoever wrote this clearly has not much idea of how the finances for something like this would work. _It's not just AI generated — it's AI slop._
10) Whoever made this has no idea whether the assets are actually still there nor do we. Spirit may already be under binding agreements for asset sales.
11) Whoever wrote this also does not understand how companies run. First of all they think they are doing something revolutionary with equity, when almost every company has ESOPs/EIPs. Profit-sharing relative to ownership is also literally how shares work and Spirit already regularly paid these out prior to beginning their financial crisis. Every publicly traded company has open books and openly reports their financials each quarter.
12) "One member, one vote — your voice is equal regardless of pledge size." What incentive would anyone have for pledging more? Also, voice in what? Vote in what?
13) "No golden parachutes — executive pay capped at a fair ratio to median worker pay." First of all, this is not what a golden parachute is. Secondly, either the fair ratio will be ridiculous to allow properly compensating execs, or they will be underpaying by a large margin and find it difficult to get any proper execs in place. Then they can speedrun the last few years of mismanagement at Spirit.
14) "The cooperative model has worked: REI, Ocean Spray, Land O'Lakes, the Packers — all people-owned." These organizations all have well thought out models. This is not the same as AI slop.
15) "Private equity is already circling the wreckage." First of all, Spirit is freely undergoing an asset sale. Their operations etc. are shut down. Not only is this not appetizing to PE, but in general PE firms stay very far away from airlines which are famously low margin difficult to operate businesses with limited potential for growth once established. PE normally focuses on airports and airport services, neither of which Spirit has (their airport assets are limited to slots at LGA which are useless to anyone except airlines). The much more obvious buyer is other airlines looking to expand control and consolidate aircrafts.
16) It is common for a company facing insolvency to shut down, do an asset sale of expensive assets, and then come online in a much smaller form with remaining assets, funding itself with the sold off assets. I don't see why Spirit would not do the same thing, in which case even if a cooperative bid is put together it would be much weaker than disjoint buyers (e.g. Frontier and JetBlue separately buying some aircrafts).
17) Lastly whoever wrote this has absolutely no plan to deal with the high operating costs and failing industry here, which is really much more important than ownership incentive structures. No amount of kumbayah we're all in this together is going to drive jet fuel prices down or change the economics of commercial aviation.
Fundamental problem: Flights don't make money. Airlines actually make all of their money through loyalty programs and credit card payments. They basically should have turned into regulated utilities long ago, but loyalty program revenue saved them.
Unless this initiative will turn into a credit card company (which nobody likes or wants to do) it won't go anywhere
Private equity will likely sell the company for parts. There is no operational improvements for cash flow that they can do.
Useful watch (skip to 2:20): https://youtu.be/ggUduBmvQ_4?si=cyysP7aH_CIEDZRq
Or they could actually charge ticket prices that cover the cost of doing business and stop treating their passengers like a it's a time-share sales pitch the whole way.
They can't do this most of the time for a simple economic reason: for most of the year on most routes, supply outstrips demand (i.e., many/most flights on most airlines fly at least a little bit empty). They have to charge fares that customers will be willing to pay, even if that means losing money on a given flight. They can only charge profitable fares on the routes and times of year when demand surges (peak routes, holiday periods, major events). They have to keep their network capacity high enough to satisfy the demand at these peak times, but for most of the year and most of the network, demand is lower, so they have to settle for break-even or loss-minimization.
Sounds like a good way to lose all your customers to the other airlines that charge less.
Consumers only look at bottom line. There is basically two markets with airlines, higher end market with credit cards and premium seating; lower end where consumer solely looks at ticket price.
They do, it’s just barely enough to cover the cost of doing business and volatility.
> "Flights don't make money. Airlines actually make all of their money through loyalty programs and credit card payments."
If that's the case then how RyanAir survived and is thriving?
It isn't the case. It's a simplistic gloss on a complex finance outcome.
Some flights make money.
Some flights lose money.
Some finance structures make money while looking like losses to acrue tax benefits for other activities.
Sometimes the money is being made by holding companies not operating companies. Sometimes the assets are worth more as spares than operating.
All companies are complex. I do not think "flights don't make money" is true for all airlines, all flights.
Because people take "airline X makes $50k profit, and makes $55k off of the credit card, so therefore it makes all money from credit cards" which is true from a certain accounting point of view, and also entirely false, in that it's all accounting tricks and the credit card would be worthless without an airline.
The company is not forced to sell immediately to whoever offers it money, they can sell themselves off for parts.
I heavily doubt PE firms are interested here as there is no potential for growth or a multiple. Spirit's assets are mainly their fleet, there are like 4 maybe 5 people who could buy, of these 2-3 are facing similar financial crises.
In the US I think nobody except United can afford to make a move, more likely some Asian airlines will move; many have grown and have route demand they can't service due to lack of aircraft. If you fly to Asia often you'll note that much of the time Asian airlines have to operate an aircraft from a US airline.
Sounds like the industry is extremely efficient. Why would we want to turn this into regulated utilities?
Because efficiency is not the end goal of life.
sounds like it's not efficient at all? it's barely functional as a business and is only surviving on grifty addons?
> if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down. The airline industry’s demand for capital ever since that first flight has been insatiable.
- Warren Buffett
I remember reading about how the major airlines now are more of a "bank that happens to have planes," due to the loyalty programs being worth significantly more than the airline. Delta Air Lines earned $8.2 billion from American Express in 2025, surpassing ticket sales revenue. [1]
I primarily use my favorite's airlines credit card because it gives me perks such as priority seating, and free checked bags. I am pretty certain that the credit card fees (that is passed on to the merchant) does not come close to the value that I gain for my credit card loyalty. It is a stupid game that I am forced to play, because the credit cards also provide other benefits, such as fraud protection.
I am wondering right now if "Spirit Air 2.0" even has a fighting chance if they are not able to subsidize operating costs by also being a credit card company.
[1] https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/delta-air-lines-m...
> The only thing missing is ownership that answers to the people — not to shareholders.
Noble, but this will fail. Why would anyone do this? No incentive.
These sorts of initiatives forget the toil of actually operating a business. You might as well get more pledges given that you'd have more control and the same profit share. It will regress to the same as the status quo.
I pledged $1,000. I have been daydreaming about a customer-owned airline for years now, just about every time I walk through an airport. This might not have much of a chance of succeeding in its purchase of Spirit’s assets, but I’d love to watch things unfold if it did.
> These sorts of initiatives forget the toil of actually operating a business.
For most businesses the size of Spirit Airlines, the owners typically do not operate the business. They pay people to do that. I don’t operate REI, even though I’m one of its many owners.
Thank you. It's nice to have an optimistic comment here amidst all the criticism. Even if the probability of it panning out is low, you'll never hit the pitches you don't swing at.
aren't there plenty of state owned airlines?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government-owned_airli...
Not in the USA. Also, the state’s interests often aren’t super well-aligned with the customers’ interests. Too many conflicts of interest for my taste.
Evidence? Isn't the state the expression of the people's will? That's the theory of democracy, isn't it?
Also, any evidence or reason to believe that an extraction-based capitalist model is more aligned with customer interests (where the customer is the thing value is extracted from, and where corporate leadership salaries are directly tied to how much they can grift from the customers) than a government where the incentive is to get the maximum number of happy fliers to vote for you?
I'm not sure that's even noble as by buying you would be a shareholder...
Yes. Reminds me of the “anarchists” that don’t realise that they just want to recreate the government but with their people in charge.
“The only thing missing is ownership that answers to the people — not to shareholders.”
Like, all people in the world?
Customers? Employees?
What does this mean?
EDIT: It’s shareholders, but each person has one vote regardless of share count.
IMHO this should have been written “to the customers and employees”. To me, those are the people who compose a business enterprise.
I’ve never seen that work. There is a fundamental tension between those groups. Hence, member-owned co-ops and employee-owned co-ops.
> I’ve never seen that work. There is a fundamental tension between those groups. Hence, member-owned co-ops and employee-owned co-ops.
Focusing strictly on shareholders (value) has been en vogue since the 1970s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
Before that the general thinking was along the lines of:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_theory
Somehow companies managed to survive and grow before the 1970s.
Co-ops don't exist at all, right?
Few people know this, but Desjardins, a Canadian financial service cooperative, is hugely popular in the province of Quebec (and also Ontario), and has close to CAD $400 billions in total assets.
I wouldn't say they are common.
MEC was the only co-op I have ever been part of. I'm pretty sure they stopped being a co-op and sold it to private equity.
For the Americans in the audience: MEC ~ Canadian REI.
See perhaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers%27_co-operative
I dont know of any with such high capex
I could easily afford any of their competitors but I always picked Spirit airlines. The pricing makes sense, pay more if you need more things. I liked Spirit because it was more akin to riding the bus, I got treated well every time by their staff and the experience was fairly consistent.
Other airlines also have cramped sits, what little they did better than Spirit isn't worth the price, and the experience was inconsistent: some times you'll get nice flight attendants, a comfy plane, and a good check-in/check-out, other times you didn't. can't plan around them. With Spirit I could plan around exactly how bad my experience would be reliably. Just about any inconvenience was some fee away to address it.
Frontier was the cheap airline that just wasn't worth it. On the flip side, AA was overpriced with snobbish (just my experience, very limited) staff. Because it's a "cheap" airline, Spirit came with low expectations, and it only exceeded them to the most part.
I shop at walmart compared to whole foods and other "better" chains for similar reasons. "great value" as walmart's motto goes, it isn't about the price, it's about the value you get for what you pay for. Spirit was the "great value" airline.
I don't think this effort to buy it will prevail, I only wish the GME betters were in on this action. The airline's value hasn't gone away, similar to Gamestop. The people like it, the demand for it there, the airlines assets and staff haven't lost their value. I don't see how it isn't a good investment. This attempt to buy it is to little, too late. but if it came in actual stock purchase agreements, I'm down for it. But donating random cash to some site as a pledge, I don't know about that.
Spirit seemed to enjoy making their customers hate them. everyone who liked Spirit had to explain themselves (like you did) because their reputation was awful. It was a trainwreck of a brand.
The only bad experience I ever had on Spirit was from their garbage passengers, never had a problem with the airline itself, flew them probably 20 times. But then again anecdotal evidence is also garbage, so who knows, maybe we were just lucky. Or maybe a vocal minority made it sound worse than it was.
Or the big airlines were paying for all that disparaging marketing on the down low. I wouldnt be surprised.
the "temu" of airlines if you will
wait a minute... what if?
loved Spirit and flew with them 8 different round trips from BWI to many destinations. So cheap (clothes in bookbag) and never had an issue. They will be missed!
> With Spirit I could plan around exactly how bad my experience would be reliably
Talk about damning with faint praise
American Airlines has actually had terrible customer ratings for some time (and I agree, they can be awful).
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/american-airlines-worst-...
Random side note. Why do many of these (presumably) LLM stamped out sites have the same aesthetic where they all need a pulsating indicator at the top as if to indicate some sort of urgency aesthetic?
I get the idea but this seems very much something not credible, like who's behind it, what are the guarantees, etc.
It seems to be an Instagram user: https://www.instagram.com/spiritair2.0/ and his own account is https://www.instagram.com/hitherehunter/
Sorry, why would I invest in a failed airline with an anonymous collective with no defined leadership?
How could it do anything but fail?
Maybe it is better to let the airline that treats people like adversarial cattle to die; maybe it is a good signal that that is a bad business model.
Yes, but also one less anything in a highly competitive industry is a bad thing overall. Not saying I think it's a good idea but I seem a grain of reasoning behind it however misleading it might be.
If the industry is already highly competitive, which the US airline market is by any measure, one more marginal carrier accounting for just 3% of passenger miles, makes very little difference.
Average pledge size is $666 (from 40k pledges). That strikes me as a lot. And obviously cursed.
That's like 39,900 people pledging at the minimum $45, and 100 investors pledging at $250k. Averages can be misleading.
Agreed, a median would be a better indication.
Seems like an interesting idea. Wish I could get some more information on who is behind this website for credibility purposes
Looks like an AI-generated site that says it's not for investment purposes but basically makes the case for investment... I'd run from this.
Yeah it honestly seems like an opportunity scam.
Spirit was killed by illegal predatory pricing!! There's no reason the corporate criminals who do this stuff would go easy on competition run by different people. The answer is anti-trust enforcement (and related enforcing of the law) and much stronger regulation of businesses in general (if not outright public/government airlines)
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/who-killed-spirit-airline...
Awesome, I hope we see a lot more of this. Co-ops do work, REI is one, Modo is another and we could have many more. Over and over again companies are slowly destroyed by extractive shareholders or PE firms, the current structure of a public company is not the only possible shape.
If the employees bought it, it would probably make more sense. Random people don't seem invested enough.
I have a pitch to buy American Spirits and American airlines to bring back smoking on airplanes. I would be happy to pivot to purchasing Spirit Air.
https://cofree.coffee/~solomon/InhaleLabs_PitchDeck.pdf
It’s kinda dumb. They don’t own any planes, and buying the spirit name means the bank/hesge fund gets paid because that’s probably the most valuable piece of property spirit has.
The employees are all gone and shuttered, even if you go try to rehire them they are all jumping to any other company if they stayed to the end. The pilots and cabin crew lost seniority and you won’t be able to afford ALPA union pay or AFA pay.
So while they somehow raised 26 million, it feels like a hollow gesture so that the creditors get paid but not really be realized into an actual airline with an AOC
At 26 million raised it’s actually better to make a new airline and run it lean. Get a good route or two and it could work, but 26 million is lean but doable. The liquidators want to get spirt planes released asap.
Looks like well-worded scam.
Let’s throw good money after bad!!!
Brilliant.
I wonder how much money I could get from starting a Kickstarter to attempt to* buy up as much of Spirit as possible.
*and fail to
I'm not American and I've never flown Spirit Air so can someone explain where all the loyalty to this airline is coming from? Like isn't this another big corp biting the dust?
I could fly from the middle of the USA to Orlando round trip for $90 if I just packed a backpack. Unbeatable value, that’s cheap enough for a spur of the moment weekend trip for the whole family.
It had good departure times both mornings and evenings.
And it was cheap, so you could book a next day flight without paying multiples in premium.
It was fun and affordable to fly out of state in the morning, spend a day exploring another place and get back at night.
For clarity, absolutely nobody did or does this. Spirit is bottom of the barrel cheap - it made flying accessible for many people, who otherwise would not fly (think Ryan air). Absolutely nobody was interstate day tripping, especially on spirt, besides this poster.
I'm not sure why you're downvoted. You're definitely right that it's extremely rare behavior.
They had affordable flights between places like LA and Vegas / Florida and Cancún so it became almost like a bus route for some people.
Not sure, maybe people like the underdog or just like the business model, you pay for what you get. I flew them a couple times and it wasn't great.
No, it’s a small corp biting the dust.
It and Frontier were the only affordable airlines.
So many airline crashes were traced back to “poor company culture” by NTSB that I would never consider flying a company owned by random internet people. Having someone with a lot to lose in charge of things is a feature.
LOL. Will this be the first AI-slop to earn an SEC investigation?
Let’s not.
This isn't really a scam because no money moves and this is non-binding. Here are a list of glaring issues I see here:
1) Pledges being non-binding means there is no proof of funds. This means they can't actually make an offer, presumably they will have to email everyone who pledged to put in cash and hope it resembles a solid offer.
2) How much is Spirit worth? Their market cap was ~50M a few days before they shut down. Where are we getting 1.75B$ from?
3) Since these are non-binding pledges I'm inclined to believe most of these numbers are bots / fake. Especially as accredited investors skew older and make up less than 1/5th of the population!
4) 666 is a very specific significant number for the average pledge size to consistently stay at. I've watched the number of patrons go up by thousands and yet the average pledge size stay the exact same. The total pledged is certainly fake as a result, although see [3] pretty sure these are all fake numbers.
5) You get nothing in return for your pledge and definitely nothing in return for your money. They go to great lengths to add disclaimers that everything is proposed and subject to change at their discretion.
6) Just like the entire site is AI slop, the disclaimers are too, not worded correctly like regular financial disclaimers, in many places not required and in other places not good enough.
7) They pretend to care a lot about disclaimers and legal verbiage yet there is no mention of the entity or who is working on this bid so missing the most basic mark when it comes to financial disclosure!
8) It says "Spirit didn't fail because people stopped flying. It failed because Wall Street loaded it with debt and extracted every dollar it could." This is just a lie, no matter how Wall Street trades your stock it doesn't affect your treasury. Spirit failed because of horrible financial mismanagement and both an inability to maintain solvency under operating costs (which rose even further recently due to jet fuel shortages) as well as an inability to secure a line of credit. Technically you could also blame their corporate strategy although this was pretty good with the Jet Blue merger, so blame here also lies directly with Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz (unlikely duo!) for championing blocking the merger. You can find this from a simple Google search or asking your AI of choice.
9) While we're on the subject of financial mismanagement, whoever wrote this clearly has not much idea of how the finances for something like this would work. _It's not just AI generated — it's AI slop._
10) Whoever made this has no idea whether the assets are actually still there nor do we. Spirit may already be under binding agreements for asset sales.
11) Whoever wrote this also does not understand how companies run. First of all they think they are doing something revolutionary with equity, when almost every company has ESOPs/EIPs. Profit-sharing relative to ownership is also literally how shares work and Spirit already regularly paid these out prior to beginning their financial crisis. Every publicly traded company has open books and openly reports their financials each quarter.
12) "One member, one vote — your voice is equal regardless of pledge size." What incentive would anyone have for pledging more? Also, voice in what? Vote in what?
13) "No golden parachutes — executive pay capped at a fair ratio to median worker pay." First of all, this is not what a golden parachute is. Secondly, either the fair ratio will be ridiculous to allow properly compensating execs, or they will be underpaying by a large margin and find it difficult to get any proper execs in place. Then they can speedrun the last few years of mismanagement at Spirit.
14) "The cooperative model has worked: REI, Ocean Spray, Land O'Lakes, the Packers — all people-owned." These organizations all have well thought out models. This is not the same as AI slop.
15) "Private equity is already circling the wreckage." First of all, Spirit is freely undergoing an asset sale. Their operations etc. are shut down. Not only is this not appetizing to PE, but in general PE firms stay very far away from airlines which are famously low margin difficult to operate businesses with limited potential for growth once established. PE normally focuses on airports and airport services, neither of which Spirit has (their airport assets are limited to slots at LGA which are useless to anyone except airlines). The much more obvious buyer is other airlines looking to expand control and consolidate aircrafts.
16) It is common for a company facing insolvency to shut down, do an asset sale of expensive assets, and then come online in a much smaller form with remaining assets, funding itself with the sold off assets. I don't see why Spirit would not do the same thing, in which case even if a cooperative bid is put together it would be much weaker than disjoint buyers (e.g. Frontier and JetBlue separately buying some aircrafts).
17) Lastly whoever wrote this has absolutely no plan to deal with the high operating costs and failing industry here, which is really much more important than ownership incentive structures. No amount of kumbayah we're all in this together is going to drive jet fuel prices down or change the economics of commercial aviation.
Exactly