Slightly off the current direction of the thread, but meaningful to the original topic:

Does anyone else even suspect that there was some master plan right at the begining of this?

Frontier try to buy Spirit for $24/share. Jet blue fear the end result or a large low cost carrier on the east coast so they come along with a sweetheart deal at $33 of which an amount will be prepaid to shareholders. Oh and if its blocked they will pay $400m compensation (but the prepay amount shall satisfy the $400m). They then put together the lamest defense during the court case. They really dont want spirit, they just want to scupper the frontier/spirit deal. Oh, and Ted, who told the shareholders to accept the frontier offer and not the JB offer (probably got some A1 gig set up at frontier), said the wrong things to the judge to seal the deal for a block with JB.

Meanwhile, NK shares tank to 5-10% of the value during merger talks. Frontier then steps back up and will probably offer some really low ball offer like $3/share.

I know, some of these numbers are rounded and I may be a little off. I may be way off on my rounding and have glazed over all the facts. Just spitballing what it feels like as a small shareholder. It would make a good daytime movie.