This isn't really a scam because no money moves and this is non-binding. Here are a list of glaring issues I see here:

1) Pledges being non-binding means there is no proof of funds. This means they can't actually make an offer, presumably they will have to email everyone who pledged to put in cash and hope it resembles a solid offer.

2) How much is Spirit worth? Their market cap was ~50M a few days before they shut down. Where are we getting 1.75B$ from?

3) Since these are non-binding pledges I'm inclined to believe most of these numbers are bots / fake. Especially as accredited investors skew older and make up less than 1/5th of the population!

4) 666 is a very specific significant number for the average pledge size to consistently stay at. I've watched the number of patrons go up by thousands and yet the average pledge size stay the exact same. The total pledged is certainly fake as a result, although see [3] pretty sure these are all fake numbers.

5) You get nothing in return for your pledge and definitely nothing in return for your money. They go to great lengths to add disclaimers that everything is proposed and subject to change at their discretion.

6) Just like the entire site is AI slop, the disclaimers are too, not worded correctly like regular financial disclaimers, in many places not required and in other places not good enough.

7) They pretend to care a lot about disclaimers and legal verbiage yet there is no mention of the entity or who is working on this bid so missing the most basic mark when it comes to financial disclosure!

8) It says "Spirit didn't fail because people stopped flying. It failed because Wall Street loaded it with debt and extracted every dollar it could." This is just a lie, no matter how Wall Street trades your stock it doesn't affect your treasury. Spirit failed because of horrible financial mismanagement and both an inability to maintain solvency under operating costs (which rose even further recently due to jet fuel shortages) as well as an inability to secure a line of credit. Technically you could also blame their corporate strategy although this was pretty good with the Jet Blue merger, so blame here also lies directly with Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz (unlikely duo!) for championing blocking the merger. You can find this from a simple Google search or asking your AI of choice.

9) While we're on the subject of financial mismanagement, whoever wrote this clearly has not much idea of how the finances for something like this would work. _It's not just AI generated — it's AI slop._

10) Whoever made this has no idea whether the assets are actually still there nor do we. Spirit may already be under binding agreements for asset sales.

11) Whoever wrote this also does not understand how companies run. First of all they think they are doing something revolutionary with equity, when almost every company has ESOPs/EIPs. Profit-sharing relative to ownership is also literally how shares work and Spirit already regularly paid these out prior to beginning their financial crisis. Every publicly traded company has open books and openly reports their financials each quarter.

12) "One member, one vote — your voice is equal regardless of pledge size." What incentive would anyone have for pledging more? Also, voice in what? Vote in what?

13) "No golden parachutes — executive pay capped at a fair ratio to median worker pay." First of all, this is not what a golden parachute is. Secondly, either the fair ratio will be ridiculous to allow properly compensating execs, or they will be underpaying by a large margin and find it difficult to get any proper execs in place. Then they can speedrun the last few years of mismanagement at Spirit.

14) "The cooperative model has worked: REI, Ocean Spray, Land O'Lakes, the Packers — all people-owned." These organizations all have well thought out models. This is not the same as AI slop.

15) "Private equity is already circling the wreckage." First of all, Spirit is freely undergoing an asset sale. Their operations etc. are shut down. Not only is this not appetizing to PE, but in general PE firms stay very far away from airlines which are famously low margin difficult to operate businesses with limited potential for growth once established. PE normally focuses on airports and airport services, neither of which Spirit has (their airport assets are limited to slots at LGA which are useless to anyone except airlines). The much more obvious buyer is other airlines looking to expand control and consolidate aircrafts.

16) It is common for a company facing insolvency to shut down, do an asset sale of expensive assets, and then come online in a much smaller form with remaining assets, funding itself with the sold off assets. I don't see why Spirit would not do the same thing, in which case even if a cooperative bid is put together it would be much weaker than disjoint buyers (e.g. Frontier and JetBlue separately buying some aircrafts).

17) Lastly whoever wrote this has absolutely no plan to deal with the high operating costs and failing industry here, which is really much more important than ownership incentive structures. No amount of kumbayah we're all in this together is going to drive jet fuel prices down or change the economics of commercial aviation.

Let's Buy Spirit Air