O'Leary Said No. Elon Musk Lost His Mind.

Ryanair, Musk, Trump, Greenland - same instinct, different scales of refusing to hear "no".

I am no massive fan of Michael O’Leary - as a person I find him to be crass, bombastic and just a bit… unpleasant.

Conversely, I don’t have much of an issue with Ryanair. While the flight experience can only be described as one hangnail away from torture, it has allowed millions of people to take holidays they might otherwise never have afforded – even if that does mean your entire week’s wardrobe is travelling with you in what is, functionally, a sturdy coin purse unless you pay for luggage.

Photo by Mateusz Delegacz on Unsplash

But I digress.

Despite my dislike for O’Leary, I find myself very willing to defend him to the hilt in the current spat that he’s been having with the most divorced man in the world, Elon Musk¹.

Not because I like Musk even less than I do O’Leary (even though I absolutely do), but because O’Leary has every right to say “no” to installing Starlink on his planes.

And that, to my mind, is entirely the point, and where this conversation should have ended. A business owner looks at the costs of doing something, decides that this is not likely to work for him, and… well, that should really be that.

Because while the story might look like it’s centred on drag coefficients, fuel burn or whether Ryanair passengers would pay for one euro for Wi-Fi on a one-hour hop to Magaluf, there’s a very different one playing out at the moment.

It’s the story of a new world order being ushered in by Musk, Trump and people like them² - and what happens when you dare say no to men who have become accustomed to treating refusal as not being rational discourse, but a slight on their person. An insult.

O’Leary said no. He said it in that weird, bluntly transactional language that Ryanair uses and understands based on costs, margins and just how much they’re able to squeeze out of a passenger before they start quietly weeping.

You’re perfectly entitled to question his numbers - SpaceX says his fuel penalty is off by a factor of ten³ - but that’s entirely beside the point. Ryanair’s decision to not buy modems from Musk wasn’t based on any sort of moral stand or culture war flourish, it was an entirely boring decision made by people who know their business and their customers.

And yet this set Musk on a one way track toward tantrum-town, and he instantly rolled out the only way he knows how to function - like a Reddit troll turned billionaire.

He opened with his usual first salvo - the insult. Then the instruction.

“Fire him.”

Then the escalation, the asking “Maybe I should buy the company.”

Then the melodrama, a poll, a crowd, a pseudo-democratic exercise that is, at its heart, a billionaire sulking.

Ryanair, to its credit, did what Ryanair does best - it capitalised.

It took that tantrum, instantly monetised it, sold a small country’s worth of £16.99 seats and made it appear as though they’d just mainlined caffeine into its social media team into a meme megafactory based out of a basement just outside Dublin airport⁴.

Bants, memes and emojis aside though, there is a far more insidious undercurrent to the situation, because Musk isn’t just a tech-founder with serious impulse control issues - he’s become part of a broader Trump-era American worldview. A worldview that tells us that “no” is no longer a complete sentence. A stance in which refusal is in no way treated as allowed, but as provocation, and consent is something that can and will be renegotiated with pressure, noise, leverage and threat.

This isn’t just Musk losing his temper, it’s him stress-testing just how much refusal he will tolerate.

We are seeing this happening on the world stage right now, in live action, with Trump’s obsession with buying an arctic island. This is exactly the same instinct that the Tangerine Tyrant has been displaying.

“Why won’t Ryanair just comply?”, is running in a straight parallel with the President of the United States bellowing “Why won’t Denmark just hand over Greenland?⁵”

In both of these cases, a sovereign country wishing to remain sovereign and a corporate entity wanting to make its own decisions on what it wants (or doesn’t want) to purchase is met with contempt. Coercion. Threat. There’s a suggestion that resistance in and of itself, a decline and exercise of agency is in and of itself irrational, hysterical or obstructive.

In the case of Greenland, Trump hasn’t asked whether the country even wants to be bought (it doesn’t), and Musk is now doing the same with Ryanair. The question is assumed to have been settled in advance, and what follows is coercion until the refusal then becomes expensive enough to reconsider.

We are now living through the first step of what I can only describe as imperialism, but imperialism for the modern age. Not so much done with maps and declarations, but imperialism exercised through markets, platforms and personal wealth.

Imperialism that uses trade as a punishment tool and where ownership is floated as the solution to disagreement. Imperialism where the message is simple and brutally consistent - “you can say no if you want to, but you will regret it if you do.”

Which is why even though there is a fair bit of humour to be had watching two wealthy men shout at each other on the internet, caution should be exercised, because jokes are how this behaviour is normalised. Jokes tend to soften the edges, and make concepts easier to digest. They allow for threats to be laughed off as banter, but embedded in the source code of that joke is the assumption that everything and everyone has a price - and if that it doesn’t, sufficient force will eventually uncover it.

Which brings me, rather depressingly, back to O’Leary. Crass, bombastic and frequently unbearable - and in this case, absolutely 100% correct.

He said no. That should have been the end of the story. It should, at most, have made for a minor headline in the FT about a corporate decision. The fact that it’s turned into headline news - that it triggered insults, demands for his firing and a casual threat of a hostile acquisition - is why this story is now becoming yet another case study in modern power.

That should worry us far more than two billionaires trading insults online, because once “no” becomes optional for the rich and powerful, it becomes optional for everyone else too - and we have to ask, what happens when this stance filters down into employment, healthcare or housing?

When we can’t refuse unsafe work, exploitative contracts or saying no to “optional” surveillance tech?

I can tell you this much, it won’t be anything good.

---

Bearly Politics is 100% reader supported. Its mission is to explain power, politics and propaganda in a deliberately confusing age, without resorting to outrage. If you’d like to support that work, you can do so with a paid subscription.

If you would prefer a one-off donation, you can do so below.

And passing the piece on is also incredibly helpful.

1. To note, I’m applying no moral judgement to divorce, merely using it as a shorthand for a man who keeps mistaking personal rejection for a system failure.

2. I’ve heard some people politely describe this as “disruption”, but mostly because “petulant feudalism” would be a bit too on the nose.

3. It could very well be, I don’t know, I don’t math so well when it comes to tubes full of people hurtling through the sky at unfathomable speeds.

4. The airline may be what it is, but I have massive admiration for just how deftly they turned “the world’s richest man is shouting at us online for some reason” into a gold-plated marketing asset.

5. Said in exactly the same tone that’s reserved for a fourteen year old demanding someone else’s lunch money.