What started as a tongue-in-cheek TikTok video has spiraled into one of the strangest financial stories of the year. Following Spirit Airlines' liquidation earlier this month, 22-year-old voice actor Hunter Peterson posted a clip suggesting Americans simply pool their cash and buy back the bankrupt budget carrier. As of the weekend of May 9, 2026, the resulting pledge campaign at letsbuyspiritair.com had blown past $337 million from more than 370,000 verified members, with an average pledge of roughly $907.
From Joke To $337 Million In A Few Days
Peterson, who calls the project the "Green Bay Model" in tribute to the publicly owned NFL franchise, has insisted that nothing has actually changed hands yet. The pledges are non-binding expressions of interest, not real payments. Even so, the velocity of the campaign has caught experts and the airline industry off guard. "This started as a joke and this is rapidly going out of control in the best possible way," Peterson said in an interview, adding that the response had forced him to spend his weekends fielding investor calls instead of recording voice-over work.
How The Green Bay Packers-Style Ownership Would Work
Under the proposed structure, every verified member would get exactly one vote regardless of how much they pledged, mirroring the Green Bay Packers' one-share-one-vote model. Profit sharing, however, would be proportional to the size of each member's contribution. Peterson argues this would prevent a private-equity-style consolidation of the carrier's assets and keep ticket prices low, addressing what he frames as the real problem behind Spirit's collapse.
The Hard Reality Of Buying An Airline
Industry analysts have been quick to caution that crowdfunding can work for small operations, but a U.S. Part 121 airline is a different animal. Any acquirer would need DOT economic fitness and U.S. citizenship certification, FAA operating authority, restored airport gates and slots at congested hubs like Fort Lauderdale, Las Vegas and Newark, and significantly more capital than $337 million for fleet, payroll and working capital. Spirit's planes, mostly Airbus A320-family jets, are also encumbered by lessors who are already moving to repossess them. Still, with 17,000 former Spirit employees out of work and the campaign mailing list growing daily, Peterson's experiment has at minimum become the most discussed airline-revival proposal of 2026.
Compiled from publicly available aviation news sources. Featured image: AI-generated by AviationShop. This article is original editorial content; facts have been verified across multiple public sources.
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