And Spirit’s shareholders knew that B6’s proposal would face way more antitrust issues over Frontier’s bid, which is why they extracted a huge breakup fee for when the obvious antitrust rejection came (it just turned out not to be a big enough fee). So now both airlines are up shit creek without a paddle since both Spirit and B6 got way unhealthier while trying to merge and B6 had to pay up a nearly $500M breakup fee for nothing.

There were genuine and obvious concerns about the exact issue around an upmarket carrier buying a ULCC and taking the ULCC’s lower fares out of the marketplace. The overall eventual outcome is “worse” bc both airlines might go under and really take capacity out of the market, but good antitrust policy is also not accepting arguments that “if we don’t do this the market will be worse off” (which is a common argument used by every merger candidate against antitrust suits), especially when there was a perfectly fine offer from another ULCC that didn’t have as clearly obvious antitrust issues.

Consumers are worse off because these airlines mismanaged their situations over the past decade - not bc the DOJ was being mean.