Elon Musk asks followers if he should buy Ryanair

Elon Musk has asked his followers on social media site X whether he should buy Ryanair, in the escalation of a dispute that began when Michael O’Leary ruled out adding Starlink internet to the airline’s planes.

In the past week, the Tesla boss has several times posted on X about purchasing the airline so he could fire its chief executive.

On Monday night, Musk posted a poll titled “Buy Ryan Air and restore Ryan as their rightful ruler”, which was viewed 30mn times.Ryanair founder Tony Ryan died in 2007.

Ryanair shares have moved little since the spat erupted last week and posted modest gains on Tuesday before falling back, suggesting investors do not expect the world’s richest person to take action. The airline has a market capitalisation of about $35bn and will be debt-free in the coming months.

Later on Tuesday O’Leary hit back, telling the FT that Musk should “spend less time undressing women and children on X”, a reference to a feature that allowed users of the social media site to use the Grok AI tool to alter images to remove clothing. The feature has since been disabled.

Under EU rules, airlines based in the bloc must be majority owned by nationals from within the area or Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein.

Ryanair previously prevented people from non-EU countries, including the UK, from buying its shares following Brexit. Last year it lifted the restrictions after finding that more than half its shareholders came from the approved list — although non-nationals are still unable to vote their company shares.

When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, which he subsequently renamed X, he was forced to raise much of the $44bn against his own Tesla shares.

The bizarre feud began when O’Leary told Ireland’s Newstalk radio that Musk knows “zero” about planes.

O’Leary said that buying an internet service from Musk’s Starlink would cost the airline $250mn a year by increasing the drag on its planes and burning more fuel, while its passengers would not want to pay for the service.

He added: “What Elon Musk knows about flights and drag would be zero . . . I frankly wouldn’t pay any attention to anything Elon Musk puts on that cesspit of his called X.”

Musk responded by calling O’Leary an “utter idiot” and saying he should be fired. One user suggested he should buy the airline instead, which Musk responded was a good idea.

Both sides have issued provocative statements since. When X suffered an outage in the US last week, Ryanair’s X account messaged suggesting it needed better WiFi access.

The airline, whose X feed is generally light-hearted, has also since tweeted that WiFi on planes is propaganda.

On Tuesday, O’Leary told the FT his comments had not been “in any way disparaging [of] Starlink”, but added: “If [Musk] wants to throw some idiot tantrum on his X account then Godspeed. We welcome all publicity.”

The airline had rebranded its January seat sale after Musk’s intervention, he added. The “Big Idiot Seat Sale” will launch on Wednesday.

“He thinks that putting two antennas on top of our aircraft wouldn’t cost us anything in terms of fuel. Not only is he wrong on aerodynamics, he’s also wrong on airline ownership rules as well,” said O’Leary, referring to restrictions on who can own EU airlines.

Both Musk and O’Leary are known for their provocative outbursts, in part to raise their own profiles without spending on advertising.

Musk, who was an avid user of Twitter, joked about buying the social media platform on the site before actually purchasing it.