Scott Kirby didn’t just leave the room. He set it on fire.
At a Bernstein conference in New York last Wednesday, the United Airlines chief walked away from any possibility of mergers. “For any time I can see,” he said, “for any time I can see in foreseeable future, no.”
The silence after those words? Loud.
Wall Street had been busy. For weeks. Speculation ran hot. Rumors flew about United making moves with American Airlines. Kirby told officials, maybe even President Trump himself, that a deal was on the table.
So the theorists pounced. They had a plan for the plan. Maybe the big American bid was fake news, just cover for something else. Something smaller. Something like JetBlue. The idea went around that if regulators saw a massive American deal die, they’d look at a JetBlue acquisition more favorably.
Kirby called that “idiotic.”
He doesn’t just dislike it. He says he doesn’t understand it at all. “That was definitely not the plan.”
A merger between United and American? It would have created a behemoth. Biggest fleet. Most capacity. Highest revenue. The biggest airline on the planet.
Would regulators have signed off? Probably not. The antitrust scrutiny would have been brutal. One of the hardest approvals imaginable.
So the theory had a kernel of logic, twisted by the need to predict a masterstroke.
“It’s just idiotic, I don’t understand it, it wasn’t the plan.”
Now the table is clear. No big mergers coming. Not anytime soon. Kirby isn’t hiding a second deal behind a dead one.
Maybe that’s fine. The market had fun with the fantasy. Now the fantasy is over.
What happens next is just flying.
