Michael O’Leary vs Elon Musk: CEOs trade jabs after X outage sparks Wi-Fi spat— what's the fight

From budget airlines to billionaire banter, a spat over in-flight Wi-Fi quickly turned into a meme-fuelled showdown between Elon Musk and Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary — complete with takeover jokes, name-calling and a cameo by Musk’s AI chatbot.

What began as a disagreement over onboard internet snow balled into a public exchange after Ryanair took a swipe at Musk during an outage on social media platform X (formerly Twitter).
What really happened between Elon Musk and Michael O’Leary
X reported an outage on Friday, January 16, causing frustration among users who said they could not post or check their feeds. The disruption was tracked by Downdetector, which showed sharp spikes in complaints from regions including the United States and India.

During the outage, Ryanair posted: “Perhaps you need Wi-Fi, @elonmusk?”

Musk responded: “Should I buy Ryanair and put someone whose actual name is Ryan in charge?” The exchange went viral, prompting memes, jokes and speculative replies from other X users.

One user tagged Musk’s AI chatbot and asked, “@grok what’s Ryanair’s market cap, how much would it cost for a hostile takeover?” Another followed up with, “@grok who are the top 5 Ryan’s that would be suitable for this job?”

Users named Ryan also joined in. One person identifying himself as Ryan wrote, “Make me CEO and I’ll give all Ryan’s a discount.”

Another user said he was willing to change his name to become the CEO: “Buy it, put me in charge, my name is Bryan, and we'll paint B's in front of the Ryan. And I'll use grok to fix everything over there and live tweet all of it on X.”

A user also said, "Be careful when you buy them. They’ll offer you a low price that will seem too good to be true, and later down the line they’ll charge you for all kinds of extras."

How brawl started?

The exchange followed earlier remarks by O’Leary, who ruled out installing SpaceX’s Starlink internet in Ryanair’s aircraft. “You need to put antenna on fuselage it comes with a 2% fuel penalty because of the weight and drag,” he told Reuters. “We don't think our passengers are willing to pay for WiFi for an average 1-hour flight.”

Speaking on a radio show earlier, O’Leary referred to Musk as an “idiot.”, adding that the Tesla owner is “very wealthy, but he’s still an idiot.”

Musk labelled O’Leary an “utter idiot” and said he should be fired. The name-calling continued as both men traded further remarks, Irish Times reported.

Musk is the richest man on the globe, with his current net worth exceeding $700 billion a while back. His net worth surpassed the combined wealth of the next three tech billionaires on the list, including Google's Larry Page, Oracle's Larry Ellison, and Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

O’Leary was set to receive a $116 million bonus in 2028 for meeting performance targets, but he still commanded a fraction of Musk’s wealth.