Musk jokes about buying Ryanair as Starlink feud with CEO Michael O’Leary escalates

Elon Musk and Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary clashed this week after the latter criticised Musk's Starlink satellite venture, prompting Musk to joke that he might buy the airline.

“Should I buy Ryan Air and put someone whose actual name is Ryan in charge?” (sic) Musk wrote in a post on X.Owned by Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX, Starlink is a satellite-based internet network service launched in 2019, whereas Ryanair is Europe's largest low-cost airline, operating short-haul flights across dozens of countries, including Ireland, the UK, Spain, Italy, and France.

The comment came in response to Ryanair's official account trolling Musk during a widespread outage on X on two consecutive days after Wednesday.Musk and O'Leary clash

The clash began when O'Leary dismissed Starlink as impractical for Ryanair's fleet in an interview on the radio show Newstalk. O'Leary, the longtime CEO of Ryanair, called Musk an “idiot” who knows “zero” about aviation.

The remarks came as Ryanair evaluated in-flight connectivity options.

O'Leary argued that adding Starlink antennas would increase aircraft drag and fuel consumption across the airline's large short-haul fleet, claiming the equipment would impose a 2% fuel burn penalty costing the carrier roughly $250 million annually.

Musk fired back, accusing O'Leary of getting the math wrong by a factor of 10. He cited real-world performance data from the Boeing 737 and referenced a Starlink executive's estimate that the drag penalty would be closer to 0.3%.Musk then went further, publicly suggesting that O'Leary should be replaced.The quip quickly took on a life of its own. On the prediction market Polymarket, bettors now assign a 26% chance that Musk will buy Ryanair by the year's end.

Market newsletter The Kobeissi Letter also weighed in, noting that if Musk paid a 50% premium to Ryanair shareholders, he could buy the entire airline for about $53 billion, which is roughly 7% of Musk's estimated net worth.

Source: EconomicTimes
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