The two paths that could turn Let's Buy Spirit into a real airline

$337 million in pledges: what it would actually take to buy Spirit Airlines

Last week, a content creator named Hunter Peterson launched letsbuyspiritair.com. In days, more than 371,000 people pledged a combined $337 million to support buying Spirit Airlines and turning it back into a working business owned by the people who actually flew it. The numbers are large enough that the conversation has shifted from "is this real?" to "could it work?"

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DealMaker has built the infrastructure for retail-funded capital raises for the better part of a decade. When questions about crowdfunding an airline land in the news cycle, they tend to come to us. So I want to put a clear answer on the public record.

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There are two real, legal paths that could turn 500,000 pledges into 500,000 owners. Each has a structure, a precedent, and a cost. Both are tried and tested mechanisms that other companies have used for the same purpose Let's Buy Spirit is trying to use them for.

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Track 1: Exempt Offering of Securities

A for-profit corporation forms to acquire Spirit's assets. Three SEC exemptions are used to raise capital:

• Regulation CF raises up to $5 million from non-accredited investors per year.
• Regulation A+ raises up to $75 million more from non-accredited investors per year, with SEC qualification.
• Regulation D 506(c) runs in parallel for accredited investors and is uncapped.

Stack them and roughly $80 million of non-accredited supporter capital becomes legally addressable, alongside unlimited capital from accredited investors. Funds escrow until the bid clears; shares issue post-close, with voting rights, dividends if the business pays them, and future liquidity if it creates it. Pacaso raised $72.5 million from over 17,500 retail investors through Reg A+ on our platform, alongside more than $200 million from Greycroft, Maveron, SoftBank, and Fifth Wall. The Oakland Ballers ran their Reg CF on the same infrastructure, raising $3.2 million from 3,800 fans, hitting their cap in nine days, and seating one fan on the board.

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Track 2: Non-profit ownership

The other path mirrors the Green Bay Packers’. The Packers are a publicly held non-profit corporation with 538,967 shareholders. Their stock carries no dividends, no appreciation, and no transferability outside lineal descendants. The point is belonging, not return. Their most recent offering, in 2021 and 2022, raised $66 million on our platform. For Spirit, a non-profit corporation would acquire and operate the airline, issuing common stock with the same disclaimers that keep Packers stock from being treated as a security under the Howey test. Retail volume is uncapped. The full $400 million-plus of pledged interest can be addressed in a single round. The regulatory burden is lighter, and the brand alignment with "owned by the people" is direct. 

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The path is real

Both paths will be hard, but the idea that retail can pull off a deal like this is no longer fringe. Scott Galloway recently called the Let's Buy Spirit campaign on his podcast and predicted that someone is going to pull a deal like this off a campaign like this in the next 12 to 36 months, drawing the same Green Bay Packers parallel I just did.

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The structure exists for community ownership at this scale. It is legal, documented, and proven on the infrastructure my team has been building for years. We know these paths work because they have both run on DealMaker’s platform. 

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Why this matters

For most of modern financial history, the answer to "who owns this company" was a fund, a strategic acquirer, or a small group of accredited insiders. That changed, quietly, over the last decade.

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Let's Buy Spirit is the first time most of the country has seen a viral version of this. Five hundred thousand people pledging $400 million in less than a week is the largest, fastest signal of retail appetite for a single business the industry has ever seen. Whether or not the airline comes back, the appetite is now visible in a way nobody in capital markets can dismiss. The next campaign is coming, and the one after that.

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To the team behind Let's Buy Spirit, and to the founder of the next campaign that looks like it: if you want to talk about what is structurally possible, we are here. Customers wanting to own the businesses they care about is the future of capital. It is the future DealMaker has been built for.