Micro1 sent a USD 12.5mln offer to Spirit Airlines' legal team on Wednesday wanting to derail Google's (GOOGL) winning bid, Business insider reports, citing a person familiar with the matter said

Competing late offers against an announced winning bid follow a familiar pattern in contested processes: the interloper's approach typically arrives close to a decision deadline, sized relative to the accepted bid, and its credibility rests on financing certainty rather than headline value. In distressed or restructuring-adjacent situations, which is the usual setting where an airline's assets or equity change hands, the board and its advisers weigh certainty of close and regulatory clearance more heavily than headline price, and topping bids of this kind have historically succeeded only where funding is demonstrably committed. The size of the offer relative to the bidder's apparent profile raises the standard question of who stands behind the financing. Worth watching are any formal response from the seller's legal team, whether the incumbent bidder improves or restructures its own terms, and whether the target's board treats the approach as a fiduciary-out trigger or dismisses it as non-actionable. Sourcing is a single unnamed person via a secondary report, which in past episodes of this kind has often been positioning by the interloper itself.