Elon Musk and Ryanair: What happened?

Elon Musk and Ryanair have been in turmoil lately, but what exactly happened?

Billionaire Tesla and the CEO of SpaceX have been exchanging barbs with Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, with little insults thrown by two grown men on social media. And it’s all about internet on short-haul flights. Here’s what was happening.

Back in Jan. 14, Ryanair ruled out the possibility of installing Musk’s Starlink internet technology on its planes, like rivals British Airways and Lufthansa. O’Leary told Reuters, “You have to put the antenna in the fuselage, it comes with a two percent fuel penalty because of weight and drag. We don’t think our passengers are willing to pay for WiFi on an average one-hour flight.”

The next day, Musk went to work on his social media site X, saying that O’Leary had been “misinformed” and wrote, “I doubt they can even measure the difference in fuel consumption accurately, especially for a one-hour flight, where the upward drag is basically zero during the climb phase due to the high angle of attack,” and pairing it all with the AI ​​Grok explainer.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.

Since then, it has been this way to – and increasingly low levels of maturity.

When X had a big problem on Jan. 16, Ryanair poked Musk at the platform, asking, “maybe you need Wi-Fi @elonmusk?” Musk fired back, tweeting, “Should I buy Ryan Air and put someone whose real name is Ryan in charge?”

Then, in a radio interview on Ireland’s Newstalk, O’Leary was asked about Ryanair’s position on Starlink. An airline executive rejected the idea again, not only explaining the impact of adding sticks to the plane — “about 2 percent in fuel consumption” and an improved fuel bill of “$200, $250 million a year…in other words, about an extra dollar for every passenger we fly” — but then pointing directly at Musk.

“I really wouldn’t pay attention to anything Elon Musk puts in that cesspit of his X name,” he said. “He was the guy who promoted the election of Donald Trump. I’m not going to ignore Elon Musk. He’s an idiot. He’s very rich, but he’s still an idiot.”

Of course, Musk fired back at X, again insulting and calling for O’Leary to be fired — a message he’s repeated on X ever since.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.

Since then, there have been a few barbs from the side on social media – on Jan. 19, Ryanair’s official X post also sent a post in response to the question posted: “what is the propaganda you don’t fall?” The airline’s response: “”Wi-Fi on planes.”

This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.

Now, Musk seems to be getting into his favorite strategy of controlling the narrative by buying it. Musk responded to the post above asking, “How much would it cost to buy you?” before later calling for O’Leary to be shot while using the ir-word slur. Then, on Jan. 19, Musk sent a poll to X, asking if he should “Buy Ryan Air and put Ryan back as their rightful governor.”

This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.

On Tuesday, Ryanair moved things to a more immature place than Musk (which is hard to do), with a post on X announcing that O’Leary had called a press conference on Wednesday at 10 a.m. in Dublin, suggesting that the airline “launches the sale of big seats for Idiots especially Elon and any other idiots on ‘X’. And yes, O’Leary held the conference, and Ryanair actually launched that for sale.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.

O’Leary thanked Musk for “an incredible boost to the community, which has seen our bookings skyrocket,” and repeated Musk’s (not good) comments about him during his speech.

“The people at Starlink believe that 90 percent of our passengers would happily pay for Wi Fi access,” he said. “Our experience, unfortunately, tells us that we think that less than 10 percent of our passengers will pay for this access, so we can’t afford the shoulder costs of between 150 or 250 million a year. If Starlink wants to match our flight and pay for the fuel, we can happily put them on board. But the only way we see Starlink working if you give away our flight for free is to give our flight for free.”

As the BBC points out, Musk will have difficulty buying Ryanair, since EU-based airlines must be mostly people from the EU, Norway, Liechtenstein, Iceland, or Switzerland.

At this point, can Ryanair go back to emptying our bags at large baggage fees and Musk actually deal with the issue of Grok continuing to create porn despite being banned from doing so?