May 8, 2026
by Annika Schneider (Purpose Foundation)
This week I went to the cinema for a bit of nostalgia. The Devil Wears Prada 2. I wanted to escape reality and reminisce about my teenage years.
The film is fun. But what stuck with me wasn’t the fashion and shiny-shiny NYC lifestyle, it was the villains. Two tech bros, modelled after Bezos and Musk, swooping in with their billions, acquiring companies, gutting them, and delivering the news to thousands of employees via automated email. A funny Hollywood take on reality.
I left the cinema with that familiar cocktail of outrage and helplessness. We laugh at the villains on screen because recognizing the pattern feels like the first step toward resisting it. But then what?
A day later, an answer, however imperfect, showed up in my feed.
What happened to Spirit?
After years of losses, failed merger attempts, rising costs, and a brutal spike in fuel prices due to the war in Iran, Spirit shut down operations. Roughly 17,000 direct and indirect employees lost their jobs.
But then, something unexpected happened.
Enter: the people's buyout
Within hours, Hunter Peterson, a voice actor and YouTube creator, floated an idea online:
What if people collectively bought the airline?
“Spirit 2.0” drew inspiration from the Green Bay Packers and their community-ownership model: one member, one vote, transparent books, capped executive pay and an ESOP plan.
And, as you can imagine, the internet reacted with feelings.
One camp came down hard.
Fair enough. Because turning a bankrupt airline into a worker-owned enterprise doesn’t happen through $45 pledges and viral posts. It takes legal architecture, financing, governance, labour negotiations, regulatory approvals, and years of patient, often invisible work. But none of this fits on a pledge page.
Others pushed back.
Maybe that’s exactly why this matters.
For decades, the cooperative economy has done rigorous, sometimes unglamorous, work – largely out of public view. So when something like Spirit Airlines suddenly puts collective ownership onto millions of timelines, the argument of this being disconnected from the complex realities required to actually make such models work at scale, feels like a missed opportunity.
As Aunnie Patton-Power puts it, we should pay attention to “when the zeitgeist starts to shift our way rather than breaking it down when it isn't perfect. The shifts we are looking for are civilizational… and if we are helpful in shepherding and stewarding, we’ll make more progress than criticizing those that are new to this game.”
If that’s true, maybe the question isn’t whether this idea is fully formed, but rather, how we engage with it as it starts to take shape. And if millions of people are beginning to imagine collective ownership as a real alternative, then maybe this, in itself, is worth paying attention to.
Honestly, I see truth in both arguments.
From our own work with founders, investors, and ownership transitions around the world, we know how difficult this is. Ownership transitions in practice and detail are rarely glamorous. It is legal documents, financial models, governance structures, hard conversations, cultural alignment, patient capital, and lots and lots of legal and financial groundwork (yawn).
And still, after my cinema experience, I find myself firmly rooting for Spirit 2.0 as something worth cheering for. Because what it represents is people refusing to accept that the only alternative for a struggling company is a private equity firm waiting in the wings.
It is resistance against the concentration of ownership in the hands of fewer and fewer. Against absentee owners making life-changing decisions for people they will never meet. Against the quiet erosion of democracies.
But for me, the most interesting part of this debate lies elsewhere. So far, most of the conversation has focused on one question: who should own the company. The employees? The passengers? The public? No doubt, important questions. But they leave an even more important one largely untouched, namely: how should the company be owned?
This distinction matters.
For decades, the dominant understanding of corporate ownership has treated companies as commodities – things to inherit, sell, or trade; tools to be optimized for more financial return.
This logic sits at the heart of shareholder-value capitalism, where ownership is an investment to be maximized rather than a responsibility to be exercised.
Too often, as a result, purpose, people, and long-term impact become secondary to short-term extraction.
Steward ownership challenges exactly that – not by changing who holds shares, but by changing what ownership itself means. It decouples money from power. It asks: who should make decisions, and why? What is the company actually for? And what governance architecture ensures it stays true to that purpose long after founders, investors, or headlines move on?
The Spirit 2.0 initiative is asking people to pledge $45 toward collective ownership. That's a start.
But the deeper – and far harder and more interesting – work lies in the how and begins after the pledge: purpose orientation, profit distribution, the governance that ensures the people's airline still belongs to the people a decade from now.
Maybe that’s what this week gave me.
For now, my fingers are crossed.
