‘Special Needs Chimp’: Spat Between Elon Musk, Ryanair Boss Goes Hypersonic After Airline Mogul Calls Tech Billionaire an ‘Idiot’

Billionaire Elon Musk’s feud with the chief executive of the Irish budget airline Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, is going hypersonic after Mr. O’Leary called the tech billionaire an “idiot” and Mr. Musk countered by branding the brash airline mogul a “special needs chimp” that “has no idea how airplanes fly.”Now, Mr. Musk is even dropping hints about buying the airline and replacing the company’s chief executive with someone actually named “Ryan.”The spat started last week, when Mr. O’Leary said Ryanair would not add Mr. Musk’s Starlink satellite service to its aircraft, as other airlines have done. Mr. O’Leary told reporters that the Starlink antennas would add a “2 percent fuel drag” and between $200 and $250 million in annual operating costs to the airline’s budget.Mr. Musk later countered that Mr. O’Leary was “misinformed” in a social media post, an aside that prompted the airline executive to refer to Mr. Musk a “very wealthy idiot.” The official Ryanair account on X, which is owned by Mr. Musk, then joined the fray by trolling Mr. Musk about an X outage by asking if, “Perhaps you need some Wi-Fi @elonmusk?”In response, the X owner responded by asking his 232.6 million followers, “Should I buy Ryan Air and put someone whose actual name is Ryan in charge?” He also posted a poll to ask whether he should buy the company. By the time the poll closed, roughly 900,000 users responded, with about two-thirds of them backing the hypothetical acquisition. On Tuesday, Mr. Musk responded to a Ryanair post and asked, “How much would it cost to buy you?”“I really want to put a Ryan in charge of Ryan Air. It is your destiny,” he said in the deadpan style for which he is known.On Tuesday, Ryanair — widely known in the UK for its spicy social media presence and often impetuous corporate pronouncements — posted on X that Mr. O’Leary will hold a press conference Wednesday to “address (undress??) Elon Musk’s latest Twitsh—.”“[Mr.] Musk knows even less about airline ownership rules than he does about aircraft aerodynamics,” Mr. O’Leary said. The airline said it is launching a “Great Idiots seat sale especially for Elon and any other idiots on ‘X’.”The “undress” comment appears to be a reference to a recent controversy surrounding X’s AI tool, Grok. The social media platform has seen a wave of users directing Grok to alter images, often asking it to depict women in revealing clothing or fully nude. The European Commission has said it is exploring implementing a ban on AI tools and apps that create such images without the subject’s consent.Last week, X said it was limiting the ability of Grok to generate sexualized images in jurisdictions where it is illegal. By Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Musk, clearly reaching the limits of his patience and sense of humor, fired back, “The insufferable, special needs chimp currently running Ryan Air is an accountant. Has no idea how airplanes even fly.”Before Mr. Musk bought X, he floated the idea of what was then known as Twitter in an eerily similar exchange to the one about Ryanair. In 2017, he asked, “How much is [Twitter]?” Five years later, he voiced frustration with the platform’s moderation rules and in March 2022 asked, “What should be done?” The next month, it was disclosed that he made an offer to buy the company for $43 billion. Ryanair has a market cap of $36 billion, and Mr. Musk’s net worth is roughly $680 billion, so the billionaire’s ire could be more of a threat to Mr. O’Leary’s independence than the chief executive cares to acknowledge. Mr. Musk’s vision for installing an individual named Ryan as the head of Ryanair, however, may be thwarted by European Union rules, which state that airlines must be majority-owned by EU nationals. The laws also limits foreign ownership to 25 percent. Ryanair did not respond to The New York Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.

‘Special Needs Chimp’: Spat Between Elon Musk, Ryanair Boss Goes Hypersonic After Airline Mogul Calls Tech Billionaire an ‘Idiot’

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