Elon Musk and Ryanair: What’s going on?

Elon Musk and Ryanair have been experiencing some turbulence lately, but what exactly happened?

The Tesla billionaire and SpaceX CEO traded barbs with Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary, with petty insults hurled by two grown men on public platforms. And it’s all about the Internet on short-haul flights. Here’s what happened.

On January 14, Ryanair ruled out the possibility of installing Musk’s Starlink internet technology on its planes, like its competitors British Airways and Lufthansa. O’Leary told Reuters: “You have to fit an antenna on the fuselage, this carries a 2% fuel penalty due to weight and drag. We don’t think our passengers are willing to pay for WiFi for an average 1 hour flight.

The next day, Musk took action on his social platform

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Since then, it has been on – and at lower and lower levels of maturity.

When 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. The airline’s CEO again dismissed the idea, describing not only the impact of adding antennas to planes – “about 2% fuel burn” and an increased fuel bill of “$200, $250 million a year… in other words, about an extra dollar for every passenger we carry” – but then directly targeting Musk.

“Frankly, I wouldn’t pay any attention to anything Elon Musk puts on his cesspit called X,” he said. “He’s the one who defended the election of Donald Trump. I wouldn’t pay any attention to Elon Musk. He’s an idiot. Very rich, but he’s still an idiot.”

Of course, Musk fired back at X, recycling the insult and calling for O’Leary to be fired – a message he has repeated on X ever since.

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Since then, there have been a few digs on social media: on January 19, Ryanair’s official Airline response: “Wi-Fi on planes.”

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Now, Musk appears to be moving toward his favored tactic of controlling the narrative by buying it. Musk responded to the post above by asking, “How much would it cost to buy from you?” before later calling for O’Leary to be fired using the R-word slur. Then, on January 19, Musk released a poll to X, asking whether he should “purchase Ryan Air and restore Ryan as the rightful leader.”

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On Tuesday, Ryanair took things into even more immature territory than Musk (hard to do), with an article on And yes, O’Leary organized the conference and Ryanair actually launched this sale.

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O’Leary thanked Musk “for the wonderful publicity boost, which allowed our bookings to increase significantly,” and repeated Musk’s insult about him (not great) during his speech.

“The people at Starlink think 90 percent of our passengers would happily pay for Wi-Fi access,” he said. “Our experience, unfortunately, tells us that we believe that less than 10% of our passengers would pay for this access, and therefore we cannot afford to incur costs of between 150 and 250 million per year. If Starlink wants to equip our plane and pay for fuel, we will happily put them on board. But the only way we can see Starlink working on our planes on short-haul flights is to give it away for free.”

Credit: Paulo Nunes dos Santos / Bloomberg via Getty Images

As the BBC points out, Musk would find it difficult to buy Ryanair because EU-based airlines must be majority owned by people from the EU, Norway, Liechtenstein, Iceland or Switzerland.

At this point, can Ryanair go back to emptying our wallets with oversized baggage fees and can Musk actually fix the problem of Grok continuing to create sexualized images despite being banned from doing so?