Did Elizabeth Warren Sell Spirit Airlines Stock Right Before the Company Collapsed?

The end of Spirit Airlines has led to plenty of people gloating about their terrible experiences with the airline. The company formally announced it was shutting down on May 2, and it also canceled all of its flights. Following that news, rumors began to spread almost immediately, suggesting that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of the more progressive politicians in Congress, had sold her Spirit stock prior to the announcement.

While Congressional stock trading is not illegal, this would have made Warren seem like a corrupt politician taking advantage of insider information if it were true. Here's what we know about whether it is.

No, there is no evidence that Warren sold any Spirit Airlines stock prior to the company's collapse. The viral claim that is circulating on social media appears to have originated with America's Last Line of Defense, a set of pro-Republican accounts on various channels that are known for sharing misinformation. Warren has been criticized for taking both sides of a merger between JetBlue and Spirit, but there is no broader evidence of corruption.

In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) on May 2, Warren wrote "Spiking fuel prices from Trump’s war was the nail in the coffin for twice-bankrupted Spirit airline. FWIW, JetBlue merger failed because a judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan, said the deal was illegal. Republicans are desperate to shift blame from higher costs hitting families." Many were quick to point out, though, that Warren had celebrated the halting of the Spirit/JetBlue merger at the time.

"I've warned for months that a @JetBlue-@SpiritAirlines merger would have led to fewer flights and higher fares," she wrote on X at the time. "@JusticeATR and @USDOT were right to stand up for consumers and fight against runaway airline consolidation. This is a Biden win for flyers!"

So it's fair to say her position on Spirit's merger with JetBlue has changed.

What you can't accuse her of, though, is profiting off of the end of Spirit Airlines. Politicians are known for shifting their position and framing arguments to make the other side look bad, so it probably shouldn't be that surprising that Warren is doing exactly that. The post suggesting that she traded stock is leveling a different kind of allegation, suggesting that, while she calls out corruption, she is in fact just as corrupt as everyone else.

We don't know whether Warren has ever traded stock based on information that she's learned in the Senate, but there's no evidence that she's done it in this case. For now, then, anyone opposed to her should find something else to criticize her for, and if you see posts suggesting she did this, you should flag them as misinformation.

No politician is perfect, and Warren is very much included there, but when we're arguing about what a politician has and has not done, we should be careful to make sure that we know what is true about a political figure and what was made up.