# We’ll take it: a TikToker rallies pledges to buy Spirit Airlines after its abrupt weekend collapse — retained record

> Retained news record from news:techcrunch.

Canonical: https://highsignal.app/data/records/884d772681bdd88c

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source: [news](https://highsignal.app/data/news) (news:techcrunch)  published 2026-05-04 02:02 ingested 2026-05-04 08:18

[original source ↗](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/03/well-take-it-a-tiktoker-rallies-pledges-to-buy-spirit-airlines-after-its-abrupt-weekend-collapse/)

## extract

When Spirit Airlines shut down overnight Saturday — canceling 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.” 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.
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. In a video posted earlier today, he winkingly tried recruiting aviation lawyers, PR people, and lawyers with a one-word ask: “Help?”
“I know what I don’t know,” he told his followers, but “you’re committing to this bit, so I’m committing to this bit.”

## retained text

No document body was retained for this record — only its metadata was stored.