Spirit Spirit customers being strapped for cash. Weighed down by debt and struggling to compete with larger rivals, Spirit Airlines filed for bankruptcy yesterday in New York after years of falling sales and failed mergers.

Don’t panic if you already have flights booked. Those yellow planes will still be flying “now and in the future,” the airline said. Spirit is petitioning to enter into the type of bankruptcy deal (chapter 11) that lets business run as usual while the company restructures a mammoth $3.6 billion in long-term debt.

• Spirit has only finished one quarter in the green since the pandemic started, losing more than $2.5 billion over four-and-a-half years.
• On top of that, Spirit is on the hook for $1.1 billion in bonds that it has to refinance by Dec. 23—a two-month extension on an earlier deadline—and must pay back next year.

Flotation device: Bondholders have already pledged new investments and bond-for-equity swaps that would alleviate $795 million in company debt, the Wall Street Journal reported. The airline is aiming to exit bankruptcy in Q1 next year.

Demand isn’t the problem. Even though Spirit flew 2% more passengers in the first half of this year than in the first six months of 2023, the airline took in almost 20% less revenue per mile, per AP.

What went wrong?

Spirit’s bare-bones business model worked for years, but recently it kept the airline from joining the post-pandemic luxury travel boom that’s helped airport royalty like Delta and United survive rising labor costs and supply-chain holdups.

And…most US airlines now offer a maximum-cheapness ticket tier, so scores of cost-conscious travelers have defected from Spirit to basic economy seats on carriers that feel less likely to lose your bag.

Denied: JetBlue was going to buy Spirit Airlines for $3.8 billion, but a federal judge blocked the deal earlier this year over concerns that it would raise airfare prices.—ML

The DOJ wants Google to sell Chrome. Google could be without its industry-leading browser if the Department of Justice gets its way. On Wednesday, DOJ officials will ask a judge—who previously ruled Google Search was an illegal monopoly—to force the company to sell Chrome, in what would be a landmark moment for antitrust efforts in the US, Bloomberg reported. Why Chrome? Regulators view the browser, the world’s most popular, as a key beachhead for users to access Google’s search engine. There’s still a long way to go before a Chrome-less Google would be a reality: Google said it plans to appeal the case, and the judge won’t make a final call until August, 2025.

Organic carrots recalled after E. coli outbreak. One person died and at least 39 people have become ill across 18 states from an E. coli outbreak linked to organic whole and baby carrots sold in US grocery stores, the CDC said Sunday. The carrots, which were supplied by Grimmway Farms in California, were sold under popular brand names including Trader Joe’s, Target’s Good & Gather, and Walmart’s Marketside. They are no longer on store shelves, but the CDC says you should throw away (or return) any bagged carrots in your house that fit the description posted on its website. The news comes as McDonald’s said it would invest over $100 million to help stores recover from an E. coli outbreak that affected its Quarter Pounders last month.

Air pollution in New Delhi soars to 50 times the recommended safe limit. New Delhi authorities declared a medical emergency, shut down activities such as construction, and closed schools due to heavy, toxic smog that has enveloped India’s capital and the surrounding areas, home to around 55 million people. In certain parts of the city, poor air quality reached more than 50x the WHO’s recommended safe limit, according to the AP. The smog is the result of several factors, but the primary cause is farmers burning their crop residue, which blows into the city and stays trapped there because of the colder temperatures. Areas of Pakistan, India’s neighbor, have been suffering under similarly heavy smog conditions for weeks.

On Sunday night, President-elect Donald Trump nominated Big Tech’s No. 1 enemy, Brendan Carr, to lead the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

A vocal critic of social media platforms, Carr plans to take an ultra hands-on approach to regulating the internet giants, expanding the power of the low-key agency currently tasked with licensing TV airwaves, regulating phone rates, and expanding internet access.

Big plans for Big Tech

Carr authored the FCC chapter of Project 2025, a wish list of conservative policy proposals for the incoming administration:

• He advocated for ending the treatment of companies like Meta and Alphabet as neutral platforms, which allows them to remove content based on their moderation policies.
• He’s called for more transparency around social media algorithms.
• Carr favors a TikTok ban on national security grounds, which is at odds with Trump’s position.

Meanwhile, he has also bashed traditional media: Carr supports action against TV networks for alleged political bias against Trump, which they’ve denied.

Who stands to gain? Elon Musk, who has been an ally. Carr is expected to send FCC funds to Musk’s satellite company Starlink for rural internet expansion. And X could benefit from harsher regulation of its social media rivals. Carr’s aim to “dismantle the [social media] censorship cartel,” earned “based” designation from Musk.—SK

A new survey found that influencers have, to an extent, replaced mainstream media. About 21% of US adults—and nearly 40% of adults under 30—now get their news from individual creators, according to a Pew report.

Surprised? Probably not. The recent presidential election highlighted the influence of influencers as both candidates leveraged creators in their campaigns and appeared on podcasts (The Joe Rogan Experience, Call Her Daddy, etc.) to make their case to voters.

About the report: Pew surveyed 10,000 adults and studied 500 news influencers, or people who regularly post about the news and have 100k+ followers. Some of the biggest takeaways:

• There’s a wide gender gap. The study found 63% of news influencers are men, compared to 30% who are women.
• X is on top. 85% of news influencers are active on the site, while Instagram, the second most popular, is used by 50% of news influencers.
• TikTok bucks trends. It has the smallest gender gap—50% male influencers and 45% female influencers—and is the only platform where news influencers who are publicly left-leaning (28%) outnumber those who are right-leaning (25%).

Looking ahead…expect legacy news outlets that are losing viewers and subscribers to start partnering up with popular influencers, no experience necessary. The study found 77% of news influencers have no past or present affiliation with a news organization.—CC

Amateur readers can’t dependably differentiate between classic works of poetry written by literary icons like William Shakespeare and ChatGPT-3.5-created poems that are modeled after them, a study published in the journal Scientific Reports last Thursday discovered.

It gets even more intriguing: Those readers rated the AI-generated poems more highly, on average, than the human-written ones, and more often thought the AI poems were written by humans. The authors suggested the non-expert readers preferred the AI poems because they were more straightforward and easier to understand than the brain-busting stylings of poets like Shakespeare and Ginsberg.

Take the test yourself to see if you can tell the difference between a famous human poet and a robot imitator.