Originally Posted by themicah
Actually, it's for the "life of the AAdvantage Gold/Plat Elite program." So if they wanted, they could rename their elite levels Ruby/Diamond instead of Gold/Plat and dump all their lifetime elites. I doubt they'd do that, though, since lifetime elite status costs them next to nothing and gives a lot of generally-wealthy travelers an incentive to fly AA over the competition.
Wouldn't work that way. Someone would sue. Unless AA changed enough to convince a judge that it's a truly new program, not just a name change or some other trivial window dressing, they'd lose on "form versus substance."