Did Senator Elizabeth Warren sell 20,000 shares of Spirit Airlines stock at a huge profit just two weeks ago? No, that's not true: A meme's claim that the senator sold shares in the airline before it went bust is unfounded. This story originated from a satire page that carries a disclaimer, "Nothing on this page is real." Press coverage documented Warren's 2024 reaction to the federal government's blocking of a merger between Spirit and JetBlue, but no legitimate reporting confirmed the senator sold Spirit stock.
The false claim appeared in a post (archived here) published by the America Loves Liberty page on Facebook on May 3, 2026. It was captioned:
Senator Elizabeth Warren, the architect of the Spirit Airlines dissolution, sold 20,000 shares of the airline at a huge profit just two weeks ago.
She bought the shares after she killed the merger deal with JetBlue two years ago for pennies on the dollar and watched them grow to be worth millions.
Two weeks later, the airline went under and ceased operations.
It's almost like she knew...
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Image source: America Loves Liberty post on Facebook.)
In the lower right corner of the screenshot (pictured above) is a logo from America's Last Line of Defense (ALLOD) with an S for satire. The Facebook page America Loves Liberty (archived here) is one of several pages run by Christopher Blair, the founder of ALLOD. The America Loves Liberty page has this disclaimer:
An authorized dumping ground for certified AI-free trollery and right-wing propaganda courtesy of America's Last Line of Defense. Nothing on this page is real.
While the ALLOD page has this disclaimer:
The flagship of the ALLOD network of certified AI-free trollery and propaganda for cash. Nothing on this page is real.
A 2012 law, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK Act archived here) states:
...require specified individuals to file reports within 30 to 45 days after receiving notice of a purchase, sale, or exchange which exceeds $1,000 in stocks, bonds, commodities futures, and other forms of securities and subject to any waivers and exclusions.
The website Capitol Trades keeps track of politician trading data. Although the time limit for reporting a trade conducted "two weeks ago" has not expired, at the time of writing on May 4, 2026, the page for Elizabeth Warren (archived here) shows "No Trade Activity".
A search of Google News for "spirit airlines stock elizabeth warren" produced no relevant reporting (archived here). The news stories surfaced in this search had to do with a March 5, 2024 post on X (archived here) made by Warren after a proposed merger between Spirit and JetBlue was blocked by the Justice Department and Department of Transportation.
One of the search results, a clickbait article from Primary Ignition (archived here), could be considered relevant to the question. The article titled "Did Elizabeth Warren Sell Spirit Airlines Stock Before the Crash? The Internet Thinks So" reports on the spread of the claim without mentioning that it originated from a satire page. Instead, the article focuses on the claim's virality and deceptively offers that "the story was amplified by Fox Business" when it wasn't. The Fox Business article (archived here) linked by Primary Ignition is not about Warren selling off Spirit stock but is actually about Warren's 2024 post on X.
Lead Stories has reached out to the office of Senator Warren and will update upon receiving a reply.
Christopher Blair is a self-professed liberal from Maine who for years has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. He often goes by the nickname "Busta Troll." A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustration. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories.
