The Let’s Buy Spirit campaign isn’t the most peculiar thing. It’s that it seemed almost real for a few hours during the weekend. Spirit Airlines shut down at three in the morning on Saturday, leaving 14,000 employees unemployed, fleets grounded, and aircraft parked in long yellow rows at Victorville and Fort Lauderdale. By Saturday afternoon, Hunter Peterson, a 31-year-old voice actor, had posted a TikTok suggesting that, given the approximately 250 million adults in the United States, it would be sufficient to purchase Spirit outright if 20% of them contributed the thirty to forty dollars required for a Spirit ticket. Set to Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky,” the video received nearly three million views. By Sunday, more than 36,000 people had pledged more than twenty-two million dollars through his partially developed letsbuyspirit.com website. The website then crashed.
This is such a 2026 concept that it’s difficult to ignore. Peterson, whose previous YouTube series, “I Flew Spirit Airlines for 24 Hours Straight,” went viral, didn’t pretend to be an expert. By his own admission, he spent about an hour building the site. In a follow-up video, he said, “It’s terrible,” and urged developers, attorneys with aviation experience, and public relations professionals to get in touch. “Get in losers, we’re buying spirit,” the deadpan Instagram bio said. Voice actor and potential CEO of an airline. More than any spreadsheet, that sentence conveys the essence of the situation. A joke that refused to be a joke.
The pitch is based on a football-related model that most Americans are familiar with. On Peterson’s website, the employee-owned grocery chain WinCo Foods and the Green Bay Packers, which have been owned by thousands of shareholders since 1923, are mentioned. A one-vote per person system with dividends based on pledge size has been discussed by Peterson. He maintains that outside investors would only be permitted to join as non-voting members. In one of the Sunday videos, he was sitting in what appeared to be a home office and said, “It shouldn’t be about how much money you have,” looking a little overwhelmed.
The air begins to thin at this point. A grocery store or a football team are not the same as an airline. The majority of aviation lawyers claim that obtaining a Federal Aviation Administration Air Operator’s Certificate, which is required to operate one, takes years and tens of millions of dollars. Without regulatory approval and the consent of creditors who, as of last week, were unwilling to submit even to the US government, Spirit’s current certificate cannot be simply transferred. The Louisiana investor group NewP3, which proposed a $1 billion private capitalization plan in February, was also unable to complete the transaction. In the depressing words of the Let’s Buy Spirit homepage, private equity is already “circling the wreckage” for a reason.
And yet. Gathering twenty-three million dollars in non-binding pledges over the course of a weekend by someone who has publicly admitted he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know is not insignificant. Peterson has been careful to emphasize in almost every clip that he hasn’t taken on a single dollar, so it’s not money; rather, it’s a signal. A portion of the American flying public seems to be genuinely fed up with ownership structures that consistently lead to the same results: mergers, bankruptcies, and rising fares on routes where Spirit once set the floor. To be honest, I don’t think the Let’s Buy Spirit campaign will make it through a meeting with an aviation lawyer. However, there is a genuine hunger for it.
As the skeptics on Hacker News correctly noted, airlines make money through credit card partnerships and loyalty programs, not from flights themselves. Reddit’s skeptics correctly questioned what happens when a stranger has millions of dollars’ worth of other strangers’ money. Peterson has consistently responded that he hasn’t yet held anything. Pledges are not transactions; they are intentions. As this develops, it’s possible that the campaign’s most honest quality is that it hasn’t attempted to act otherwise.
It’s anyone’s guess what comes next. Perhaps a legitimate investor purchases a portion of Spirit’s assets out of bankruptcy using the pledge list as evidence of demand. Perhaps Peterson finds a co-founder who has a balance sheet and a pilot’s license. By Wednesday, perhaps it all fades. In any case, the notion of a passenger-owned airline ceased to sound completely absurd for a weekend in May. Just that is noteworthy.