{"id":247308,"date":"2026-01-23T05:12:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T05:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/247308\/"},"modified":"2026-01-23T05:12:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T05:12:09","slug":"ryanair-boss-reminds-elon-musk-of-takeover-rules-as-pair-exchange-insults","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/247308\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryanair boss reminds Elon Musk of takeover rules as pair exchange insults"},"content":{"rendered":"

Musk founded Tesla and heads Starlink<\/a>, the satellite internet system developed by his aerospace company SpaceX<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He has been suggesting for days that he might buy publicly listed Ryanair, Europe\u2019s largest airline by passenger numbers.<\/p>\n

It comes after Irishman O\u2019Leary ruled out using Starlink to equip his fleet with Wi-Fi, estimating that the drag created by aerial antennae on Ryanair\u2019s planes would cost up to $250 million a year in extra fuel.<\/p>\n

Ryanair\u2019s passengers would also not want to pay for the internet service, he insisted.<\/p>\n

Musk has called for O\u2019Leary\u2019s firing, describing him as \u201ca real idiot\u201d.<\/p>\n

USA Today reported that Ryanair then launched a \u201cGreat idiot seat sale especially for Elon Musk and any other idiots on X\u201d, offering 100,000 seats for \u20ac16.99 ($33.96) for one-way fares. <\/p>\n

O\u2019Leary has described social media, and X especially, as a \u201ccesspit\u201d. <\/p>\n

Ryanair has a market capitalisation of about $63 billion. <\/p>\n

EU regulations stipulate that airlines based in the bloc must be majority-owned by EU citizens, or those of certain European countries outside the EU.<\/p>\n

Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, for $66b in 2022.<\/p>\n

– Agence France-Presse. Additional reporting: NZME<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Musk founded Tesla and heads Starlink, the satellite internet system developed by his aerospace company SpaceX. He has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247309,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4376,806,13475,4282,138,3937,66419,17448,6446,2174,3938,71,10750,41305,18792,700,5494,17449,111,139,144298,69,2336,1118,13792,144297,3109,88284,57103,6122,19336,6380,26592,1361,165,4483],"class_list":["post-247308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-airline","tag-as","tag-billionaire","tag-boss","tag-business","tag-chief","tag-controlling","tag-elon","tag-european","tag-exchange","tag-executive","tag-from","tag-instalment","tag-insults","tag-irish","tag-latest","tag-michael","tag-musk","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-noneuropeans","tag-nz","tag-oleary","tag-of","tag-pair","tag-prohibit","tag-public","tag-reminded","tag-reminds","tag-rules","tag-ryanair","tag-spat","tag-takeover","tag-that","tag-their","tag-union"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}