The viral TikTok $1.75 billion bid to save Spirit Airlines is fighting the wrong villain

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’t ready to give up yet. Hunter Peterson, a 22-year-old voice actor for video games like Hyrule Warriors, posted a Tik Tok shortly after Spirit announced it was ceasing operations on Saturday, with a pitch for all of America: “We could buy Spirit Airlines.”There’s 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. The site has an interesting, quite populist framing. “Private equity is already circling the wreckage,” it reads. “The passengers, the workers, and the communities Spirit served can take it back. Like the Green Bay Packers. Like WinCo Foods. Like us.” 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. The pitch is fighting a nonexistent villain. Private equity isn’t involved with Spirit’s downfall. No one—not Frontier, which tried twice to merge with it, and neither the Trump administration nor any venture fund—wanted to buy the airline at the price its creditors needed. Spirit’s CEO cheekily told CNBC on Monday that “we just kind of ran out of runway.” Spirit is dissolving, and it told the bankruptcy court this week it doesn’t even have enough cash to host an organized auction of its own aircraft and engines. Instead it’s optin