Elon Musk Threatens To Buy Ryanair, Demands CEO Michael O’Leary Be Fired
Elon Musk is really mad that Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary doesn’t want Starlink on his planes, and has now threatened to buy the whole damn company and sack him.
Their beef started when O’Leary told Reuters that Ryanir wouldn’t be making a deal with Musk’s Starlink to add satellite internet across their flights, because it would be too expensive and he didn’t think people would buy internet on short flights.
He explained: “You need to put antenna on fuselage, it comes with a 2% fuel penalty because of the weight and drag. We don’t think our passengers are willing to pay for WiFi for an average 1-hour flight.”
Seems reasonable enough, but as we all know, Elon Musk does not take rejection very well. And so he issued a statement calling O’Leary “misinformed” and suggested that Ryanair will lose customers if it doesn’t introduce Starlink to its flights.
Well those comments really escalated their feud to the next level because O’Leary then went on radio and called Elon an “idiot”.
The Ryanair CEO ripped into Musk, saying: “I would pay no attention whatsoever to Elon Musk. He’s an idiot. Very wealthy, but he’s still an idiot.”
“What Elon Musk knows about flights and drag is zero. We have to put an aerial antenna on top of the aircraft. It would cost us around $200-250 million a year. In other words, about an extra dollar for every passenger we fly. And the reality for us is that we can’t afford those costs. Passengers won’t pay for internet. If it’s free they’ll use it, but they won’t pay €1 to use the internet.”
“I frankly wouldn’t pay any attention to anything that Elon Musk puts on that cesspit of his called X. He was the guy who advocated to getting Donald Trump elected.”
Naturally, Elon was fuming with this and first called for O’Leary to be fired…
Before threatening to buy Ryanair and replace O’Leary with someone actually named ‘Ryan’ (pretty funny to be fair):
I mean, this is the richest guy in the world we’re talking about so he can literally make this happen out of pure pettiness if he really wants to. It does sound like it’s the only way that Starlink is going to become available on Ryanair flights, but that would probably just be a bonus in Elon’s eyes compared to the thrill of buying out an online nemesis.
Remember – the last time Elon Musk ‘joked’ about something like this he ended up paying $44 BILLION to acquire Twitter and turn it into X. Ryanair rebranded to X-Air by the end of the year? Someone get Polymarket on the case.
Interestingly, Michael O’Leary has quite the history on X. Remember that disaster of a Q&A session from way back in 2013?
