Ever had a minor disagreement with a colleague that just… escalates? Maybe you bicker over who should refill the communal coffee machine. Next thing you know, you’ve challenged them to a fight in the parking lot and are musing about buying their family’s house just to move them out. This, but with a couple of billionaires and a social media platform on the fritz, is exactly what has the internet gleefully cackling this week.
In the blue corner, we have Elon Musk, tech’s most prolific tweeter, owner of X (née Twitter), and a man whose reaction to being called an “idiot” is to suggest buying the entire company that employs you. In the red corner, we have Michael O’Leary, the notoriously blunt CEO of Ryanair, Europe’s biggest budget airline. His business philosophy can be summed up as: “If you can’t bolt it to the floor and charge €20 to use it, we don’t want it on our planes.”
Their viral spat over in-flight Wi-Fi has become a masterclass in petty escalation, hilarious memes, and a stark look at how billionaires bicker when one of them could theoretically write a check for the other’s entire life’s work… and still have enough left over for a decade of scented candles.
Round One: A Clash of Industrial Titans (Over 0.3% Drag)
The bell rang not with a ding, but with the faint sound of buffering. In January 2026, while legacy airlines like Lufthansa were signing deals to equip their fleets with Musk’s Starlink satellite internet, O’Leary gave it a firm “no, thanks”. His reasoning was pure Ryanair: pragmatism over pizzazz.
He argued that installing the Starlink antenna would cause a 2% fuel penalty due to weight and drag, costing the airline a whopping $200-$250 million a year. On an average one-hour Ryanair flight, he argued, passengers simply aren’t willing to pay for Wi-Fi. “Passengers won’t pay for internet usage; if it’s free, they’ll use it—but they won’t pay one euro each to use the internet,” he said.
Musk’s response was swift and dismissive. He claimed O’Leary was “misinformed” and that Ryanair didn’t know how to measure fuel impact. Starlink’s VP of Engineering, Michael Nicolls, backed him up with data, suggesting the penalty was closer to 0.3%. The technical spat was on, but it was about to get very personal.
Round Two: The “Idiot” Volley and the Great Outage Pile-On
Things turned sour faster than milk left in a Ryanair overhead bin on a sunny tarmac. In a radio interview, O’Leary told people to “pay no attention whatsoever to Elon Musk.” He added the verbal dagger: “He’s an idiot. Very wealthy, but he’s still an idiot”.
Musk, never one to let an insult pass without launching a tactical nuke from his phone, fired back on X. His verdict? O’Leary was an “utter idiot” who should be fired from the airline he’d run since 1994. The billionaire equivalent of “I’m telling your dad!”
Then, fate—or some very shaky server code—intervened. X suffered a massive global outage. Users worldwide, including tens of thousands in the US, UK, and beyond, found their feeds dead. Even Musk’s own AI chatbot, Grok, was affected.
Seizing the moment with the impeccable timing of a seasoned troll, the official Ryanair account tweeted a deliciously simple jab: “Perhaps you need Wi-Fi, @elonmusk?”.
Round Three: The Hostile (Joking?) Takeover Bid
This was the cheese that broke the billionaire’s back. Musk, perhaps typing from a dark room on a backup cell phone, unleashed his masterstroke. He responded to the Ryanair dig not with another insult, but with a business proposition dripping with chaotic energy: “Should I buy Ryan Air and put someone whose actual name is Ryan in charge?”
Let’s pause here to unpack the absurdity. It’s like telling your neighbor you don’t like the way they mow their lawn, so they start asking the neighborhood Facebook group if they should just buy your house and install a Roomba named “Lawny” as groundskeeper.
The internet, of course, exploded. One user offered to be the Ryan in charge but demanded payment in Dogecoin. Another posted an AI-generated image of Musk with actor Ryan Gosling as his co-CEO. Musk’s own Grok AI was reportedly asked to calculate Ryanair’s valuation. Memes flew, analysts sputtered, and the world watched as a debate about airplane antennas turned into a fever dream of corporate fan fiction.
The Stakes at a Glance
To understand why this is funny, you need to see the sheer scale of the mismatch. This wasn’t just any feud—it was a clash of financial titans with wildly different priorities.
How This Could End: Four (Mostly) Silly Scenarios
Will Musk actually buy Ryanair? Almost certainly not. He’s got rockets to land, a social media platform to run (which is currently losing the user race to Meta’s Threads, by the way), and enough other projects to keep a thousand mortals busy. But let’s play out the possible endings to this glorious saga.
- The Petty Purchase (The Unlikely Blockbuster): Against all reason, Musk buys Ryanair. He renames it “Elon Air,” makes Wi-Fi free, and paints every 737 to look like a Cybertruck. O’Leary, contractually obligated, is given a new role as “Chief Ancillary Revenue Officer,” tasked with figuring out how to charge for oxygen masks. The first in-flight safety video is hosted by Grok.
- The Feeble Truce (The Most Boring Outcome): The news cycle moves on. Musk gets distracted by a new AI project or a fight with Mark Zuckerberg. O’Leary goes back to his spreadsheets, charging for seat selection and quietly muttering about drag coefficients. They never speak of it again, except in vague terms at Davos parties.
- The Regulatory Roast (The Karmic Justice): Musk’s casual takeover talk attracts the eye of financial regulators on two continents. The ensuing paperwork and hearings are so mind-numbingly boring that both men agree to a ceasefire just to make it stop.
- The Eternal Meme (The People’s Victory): This is the real ending. No money changes hands, no CEOs are fired. The fight simply becomes immortalized in internet culture. Years from now, whenever X goes down, someone will post the “Perhaps you need Wi-Fi?” screenshot. Whenever an airline announces a new fee, someone will Photoshop Musk’s face onto a Ryanair plane. They didn’t just have a fight; they gave us a gift.
In the end, the great Starlink spat of 2026 is about more than Wi-Fi. It’s a perfect snapshot of our age: where technology, ego, and business collide on a public stage for everyone’s entertainment. It proves that even when you’re rich enough to solve earthly problems, you can still be poor enough in spirit to get into a playground squabble over who’s the bigger idiot.
And for that, we thank them both. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to check if X is back up. I have some memes to post.
by Elena Makree