Spirit Airlines: Gone in a Poof of Smoke!

Well, as always at this time on a Monday, a little sweeter that it's a winning Monday. Yes, it is. Pistons moving on. 313, baby. As always, we talk to our good friend, Mike Lee, the managing editor at Cranes Detroit Business, which is brought to you by Mercantile Bank. Looking for a new business bank, Mercantile, can help drive your business forward. Learn more at Merckbank.com. Michael, good morning. Good to have you back. Good morning, Chris. Thank you. So Spirit Airlines officially shuttered their doors on Saturday. What does that mean for us here locally? Yeah, this is, obviously, it was a very almost sudden shutdown, even though there were warnings ahead of time. You know, people woke up Saturday morning to the news that, you know, Spirit was done. It wasn't flying anymore. Folks who had tickets were kind of out of luck. They are left to find flights on other airlines. Other airlines are capping their fares. If you have a spirit confirmation number, you might be able to get a new ticket for... something on the order of $200, and Spirit's giving refunds to those who did hold tickets, but still kind of leaves you stuck in the short term. You know, Spirit was really in a vicious spiral fuel prices spiked, and it was already in a lot of financial trouble, hasn't made money since 2019, and it just became too much. The government looked to bail it out. The $500 million reportedly offer to take most, the majority ownership of Spirit was rejected by its creditors who it owes money to in bankruptcy. They basically decided it was going to be a better deal for them to sell off the airplanes and shut the doors. So, you know, what's next? You know, are there other airline problems waiting in the wings out there? Hard telling, Spirit was by far the worst basket case, but the price of fuel is not going to be any easier on any other airlines. They have a lot of ways to manage that, but the longer they stay high, the tougher it's going to be. Mike also got a couple of hotel opportunities downtown, and you know we always need more hotel rooms, but there's another kind of long shot proposal as well. Yeah, downtown has the new JW Marriac going up next to Huntington Place and news arrived last week that the convention center is working with the Sterling Group development partner to build a whole other hotel on a block on West Fort where the existing buildings there will be demolished and this new hotel is intended to just like the J.W. Marriott serve as a convention center hotel with a skywalk straight into Huntington Place. Big deal. This is something the tourism officials in Detroit have long been.

Long been after is, you know, really large blocks of hotel rooms so they can lower bigger conventions to Huntington. Same time, a little ways across town. The owner of the 600 Tower of the Renaissance Center, Mahmoud al-Hadidi, a local doctor, bought that a building a few years ago, had some plans to redo it as, you know, redo it and marketed as office space. has now decided that the market for office space is not going to support that and has proposed to Detroit City officials looking for some tax breaks to convert that into a combination of a hotel and then residential on top. This is one of the shorter towers of the RENCEN that aren't owned by General Motors. This one in particular is mostly empty it as like two tenants. So it's a separate piece from the redevelopment of the five big towers. It seems like, you know, I don't know how likely this is to happen. It hasn't received these tax breaks, but it has requested them. So that's something to keep an eye on. Like you said, hotel rooms have been much in demand in downtown Detroit as we get more tourism and more convention work. And they think there's still room to grow that for the city. and hotel rooms will be a key piece of it. Meanwhile, in Ann Arbor drug maker is being bought. Yeah, a billion dollar deal in Ann Arbor, a drug maker with kind of an interesting history, Asperian Therapeutics. Its corporate roots go back to 1998 and a researcher by the name of Roger Newton, who was one of the developers of the cholesterol drug Lipitor while he was with Pfizer. He started a separate company with some other potential drug compounds that were similar. At the time, finding new cholesterol drugs was a big bonanza because Lipitor made so, so much money. But a dispirion has gone through a number of loops over the years. Pfizer actually bought it at one point, and then Newton brought the patents to the drugs back. It's never really made money. It does have a couple of those cholesterol drugs on the market, but they don't work as well for most people as Lipitor. So it's just been a limited market. Anyway, they got bought by a French health care investment firm named Archimed, $1.1 billion. for stockholders it nearly doubled the value of the stock from a day earlier so it looked like a pretty good deal to them experience really been in turnaround mode under a relatively new CEO over the last several years who cut its debt solve some payout problems from business partners so it looks like a positive move up for this for this drug maker interesting stuff as always you can check out all of that and more at crane's Detroit business Mike Lee always appreciate it happy Monday do you

Thank you. Yeah. Meanwhile, on the heels of the spirit news this weekend, there's a group out there. They started a website. It's called let's buy spirit.com. And there has been a number. And the whole idea here is that people want to buy spirit. Yeah. Like they want to rejuvenate it. There has been $88 million that has been collected through this point. Basically. within the last couple of days. Yeah. The goal here is to get to, what, just over two, almost $2 billion, $1.75 billion to buy Spirit. And they have already raised $88 million in just a couple of days. Listen, man. Let's BuySpirit.com. People, I don't know, you know, you hear complaints on one side about Spirit and you hear love about Spirit on the other side. So, you know. To raise that kind of money in just a few days, they just shut down. Right. Saturday. Saturday and have 88 million raised? Hunter Peterson is a voice actor, and he does a lot of video game voices. Okay. But he's the one that started this. He said he launched it Saturday. He initially put a TikTok video. It drew 2.8 million views. So he's like, let's buy spirit. Okay. Unbelievable. We're talking Pistons next to J.R. Morning.