Elon Musk and Ryanair have been experiencing turbulence of late, but what exactly has occurred?
The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO has been swapping barbs with Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, with petty insults thrown around by two grown-ass men on public platforms. And it’s all about internet on short-haul flights. Here’s what’s been happening.
Back on Jan. 14, Ryanair ruled out the possibility of installing Musk’s Starlink internet tech on its planes, like competitors British Airways and Lufthansa. O’Leary told Reuters, “You need to put antenna on fuselage, it comes with a two percent fuel penalty because of the weight and drag. We don’t think our passengers are willing to pay for WiFi for an average one-hour flight.”
The following day, Musk sprang into action on his social platform X, claiming O’Leary was “misinformed” and writing, “I doubt they can even measure the difference in fuel use accurately, especially for a one hour flight, where the incremental drag is basically zero during the ascent phase due to high angle of attack,” and pairing it all with an AI Grok explainer.
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Since then, it’s been on — and in increasingly lower levels of mature.
When X suffered a major outage on Jan. 16, Ryanair took a jab at Musk on the platform, asking, “perhaps you need Wi-Fi @elonmusk?” Musk fired back, tweeting, “Should I buy Ryan Air and put someone whose actual name is Ryan in charge?”
Then, in a radio interview on Ireland’s Newstalk, O’Leary was asked about Ryanair’s stance on Starlink. The airline CEO rejected the idea again, not only describing the impact of adding antennas to aircraft — “about a 2 percent fuel drag” and a boosted fuel bill of “$200, $250 million a year…in other words, about an extra dollar for every passenger we fly” — but then targeting Musk directly.
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“I frankly wouldn’t pay any attention to anything that Elon Musk puts on that cesspit of his called X,” he said. “He was the guy who advocated to getting Donald Trump elected. I would pay no attention whatsoever to Elon Musk. He’s an idiot. Very wealthy, but he’s still an idiot.”
Of course, Musk hit back on X, recycling the insult and calling for O’Leary to be fired — a message he’s repeated on X since.
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Since then, there’s been a few side-eye barbs on social media — on Jan. 19, Ryanair’s official X post retweeted a post responding to a question posted: “what is a propaganda you’re not falling for?” The airline’s response: “”Wi-Fi on planes.”
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Now, Musk appears to be moving into his favoured tactic of controlling the narrative by buying it. Musk responded to the above post asking, “How much would it cost to buy you?” before later calling for O’Leary’s firing while using the r-word slur. Then, on Jan. 19, Musk posted a poll to X, asking whether he should “Buy Ryan Air and restore Ryan as their rightful ruler.”
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On Tuesday, Ryanair moved things into even more immature territory than Musk (hard to do), with a post on X announcing that O’Leary has called a press conference on Wednesday at 10 a.m. in Dublin, suggesting the airline is “launching a Great Idiots seat sale especially for Elon and any other idiots on ‘X’.” And yes, O’Leary did hold the conference, with Ryanair actually launching that sale.
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O’Leary thanked Musk “for the wonderful boost in publicity, which has seen our bookings rise significantly,” and repeated Musk’s r-word slur about himself (not great) during his address.
“The Starlink people believe that 90 percent of our passengers would happily pay for Wi Fi access,” he said. “Our experience, sadly, tells us we think less than 10 percent of our passengers would pay for this access, and therefore we can’t afford to shoulder costs of between 150 or 250 million a year. If Starlink wants to fit our aircraft and pay for the fuel drive, we’d happily put them on board. But the only way we see Starlink working on board our aircraft on short haul flights is if you give it away for free.”
Credit: Paulo Nunes dos Santos / Bloomberg via Getty Images
As the BBC points out, Musk would have a hard time buying Ryanair, as airlines based in the EU must be majority owned by people from the EU, Norway, Liechtenstein, Iceland, or Switzerland.
At this point, can Ryanair get back to draining our wallets with oversized baggage fees and Musk actually address the issue of Grok continuing to created sexualized images despite being banned from doing so?
