Things out of the USA just seem to get more and more weird these days. 🙄
Elon Musk floats idea of buying Ryanair after calling CEO ‘an idiot’
Tesla boss clashed with Michael O’Leary when airline boss rejected installing Starlink technology on aircraft
Julia Kollewe
Follow Julia Kollewe in My Guardian
Notifications off
Tue 20 Jan 2026 15.19 GMT
Listen to this article3:36
Elon Musk has floated the idea of buying the budget airline Ryanair, escalating his public spat with the Irish carrier’s boss, Michael O’Leary.
The two outspoken businessmen have locked horns since last week, when O’Leary was asked whether he would follow Lufthansa and British Airways in installing Musk’s Starlink satellite internet technology on his fleet of 650 aircraft.
The
Ryanair chief executive rejected the idea, saying that adding antennas to the jets would result in “2% fuel drag”, adding an extra $200m-$250m to its $5bn (£3.71bn) annual kerosene bill.
Musk said that interpretation was “misinformed” in a post on his X platform, prompting a tit-for-tat exchange of insults, with each calling the other an “idiot” and then the Tesla and SpaceX CEO saying O’Leary should be fired.
On Friday, the world’s richest person asked his followers on X whether he should buy Europe’s biggest airline, which is valued at €30bn (£26bn),
posting: “Should I buy Ryan Air and put someone whose actual name is Ryan in charge?”
He followed it up with
a poll asking whether he should “Buy Ryan Air and restore Ryan as their rightful ruler”. More than three-quarters of the nearly 900,000 respondents said yes, three hours before the poll closed. Tony Ryan, the Irish billionaire businessman who co-founded the budget airline in 1984, died in 2007.
Ryanair’s X account also mocked Musk, posting in response to an X outage across the US last week: “Perhaps you need Wi-Fi @elonmusk?”
Musk
wrote in a reply to a post from the airline teasing him: “How much would it cost to buy you?”
All this may look like idle talk, but the billionaire has followed through on such threats before. In a social media exchange in 2017 he tweeted that he loved Twitter and when a journalist suggested he should buy it, Musk replied: “How much is it?” He bought the platform almost five years later in a $44bn deal, later renaming it X.
However, movements in the airline’s share price on Tuesday suggested investors were not taking the idea of a takeover seriously, with Ryanair shares closing nearly 1% down.
Musk was born in South Africa and, after a stint in Canada, now lives in the US. Airlines based in the EU must be majority-owned by EU nationals or citizens of Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein under the bloc’s rules.
The row began when O’Leary spoke on Irish radio on Friday, telling an interviewer that he would take no notice of what the Tesla CEO had to say about installing wifi on Ryanair planes.
skip past newsletter promotion
Sign up to Business Today
Free daily newsletter
