Hunter Peterson Crowdfund Hits $26M Post Spirit Shutdown
Spirit Airlines went dark at 3 am on Saturday. By Sunday afternoon, the internet had decided it wanted to buy the airline back.
When Spirit Airlines shut down overnight Saturday, cancelling all flights, letting go of 17,000 employees, and telling ticketholders to just not come to the airport, people were flabbergasted but also bereft. For all its indignities, Spirit was cheap. Then one of them had an idea. Hunter Peterson, a voice actor with frequent flyer grievances, posted a TikTok asking: What if 20% of American adults chipped in the price of a Spirit fare and just bought it? He called it “Spirit 2.0: Owned by the People.”
The response was overwhelming. Within hours, he’d thrown up a website, a janky, one-hour job by his own admission, and by Sunday, 36,000 “founding patrons” had pledged nearly $23 million, crashing his servers in the process.
The Spirit Airlines crowdfunding TikTok viral story moved faster than anyone expected. The search term “let’s buy spirit com” was trending on Google with more than 100,000 searches in 20 hours, up 1,000%. Pledges later reached $26 million from nearly 40,000 people.
The campaign aimed to purchase the airline’s assets before private equity firms could snap them up and turn them into a community-owned cooperative. The proposed ownership model is based on the NFL’s Green Bay Packers structure, with every verified member receiving one equal vote on major decisions regardless of pledge size, while profit-sharing dividends would be distributed proportionally.
Peterson’s pitch was simple and emotionally clear. The website reads: “At 3:00 a.m. on May 2nd, 2026, Spirit Airlines turned off the lights. The planes stopped. The gates went dark. The airline that carried 44 million Americans last year simply ceased to exist.”
However, Peterson is not pretending the numbers add up. None of it is real money. These are non-binding pledges. Also worth noting: the actual cost of acquiring and relaunching an airline runs into the billions. Peterson knows this.
What the Viral Moment Reveals About Aviation
The $1.7 billion target Peterson has set reflects the brutal reality of airline valuations. Spirit’s collapse followed years of furloughs, layoffs, and a failed $500 million federal bailout from the Trump administration. To understand the scale of the challenge, one only needs to look at the 2022 attempt by JetBlue to acquire Spirit for approximately $3.8 billion.
Crane hopes that his story serves as a warning to people who run AI agents. He doesn’t want people to understand “the systemic failures across two heavily-marketed vendors.”
As a result, the Spirit Airlines crowdfunding TikTok viral campaign may not save the airline. However, it says something loud and clear about a public that is tired of watching budget travel disappear into bankruptcy courts and private equity hands. Whether Let’s Buy Spirit becomes a real business or stays a beautiful internet moment, the message landed.
