A TikTok campaign to buy and revive Spirit Airlines has secured more than $132 million in pledges, just days after the budget carrier suspended operations.
The campaign, started by content creator Hunter Peterson, has already drawn interest from more than 170,000 people looking to take over the company. Peterson’s plan relies on non-binding pledges rather than actual donations, meaning the $132 million figure reflects a promise of future support rather than cash in hand.
Spirit Airlines announced on May 2 that it was ceasing operations effective immediately. The company cited years of financial losses exacerbated by rising fuel costs and an inability to secure the hundreds of millions of dollars in liquidity required to sustain the business.
“Sustaining the business required hundreds of millions of additional dollars of liquidity that Spirit simply does not have and could not procure,” Spirit President and CEO Dave Davis said in a statement. “This is tremendously disappointing and not the outcome any of us wanted.”
Peterson, a voice actor and TikTok creator, proposed the idea of “nationalizing” the airline through a community-owned model in a video that has reached 6.1 million views. He subsequently launched a website, letsbuyspiritair.com, to track interest in the proposal.
As of Tuesday, the average pledged amount stood at $772. Peterson described the momentum as a joke that is “rapidly going out of control in the best possible way.”
The sudden surge in traffic caused the pledge website to crash on May 4. Peterson said he was seeking assistance from developers, aviation lawyers and industry executives to formalize the plan.
“I’m not talking to anyone on TV or anything like that,” Peterson said in a TikTok video after the website was posted. “If you want to hear from me, it will be on social, until I talk to my lawyers.”
The plan faces massive legal and financial obstacles.
Under U.S. Department of Transportation regulations, any entity seeking to operate an airline must pass a rigorous “fitness” test, which includes proving adequate financial resources and competent management. In addition, federal law requires that U.S. airlines be under the “actual control” of U.S. citizens, with at least 75 percent of voting interest held by Americans.
A purely crowdfunded major airline has no historical precedent in the U.S., even though worker-owned cooperatives are common in other industries. In 1994, United Airlines became the largest employee-owned company in the world via an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, but the model eventually collapsed during the industry downturn following the September 11 attacks, leading to a 2002 bankruptcy filing.
An industry expert also told USA TODAY that Spirit would have already been rescued if it had a viable future.
“Spirit will come back in other forms: The planes will come back painted some other way, some of the employees will come back in other uniforms, some of the slots will be operated by other carriers who absorb the use or lose requirements, some of the ground facilities will come back with new equipment, airports will have to put up new signage,” Robert W. Mann Jr., current president of R.W. Mann and Co., an independent airline consultancy, said. “But other than that, I don’t see it coming back,” he added.
Critics of the current TikTok campaign have raised concerns regarding the validity of the pledges and the scale of the debt involved. On Reddit, some observers pointed out the ease of inflating the numbers.
“You can currently ‘pledge’ a million dollars after doing nothing more than verify your email,” one user wrote. “The number is totally meaningless.”
Others questioned the viability of the leadership.
“The ‘organizer’ has floated the idea that he would be CEO, that’s a deal-ender right there for me,” another commenter added.
Supporters of the move argue that maintaining a low-cost carrier is essential for market competition.
“The goal isn’t to be profitable, it’s to maintain an alternative to the other airlines to keep costs down for everyone,” one supporter wrote, suggesting the airline could be run as a co-op similar to a local supermarket.
The $132 million currently pledged remains a fraction of the capital required. Industry analysts suggest Spirit would likely need upwards of $1 billion to settle outstanding debts and resume flight operations.
