Elon Musk runs a poll on buying Europe's biggest airline after getting into a spat over in-flight WiFi

• Elon Musk has been quarrelling with Ryanair and its CEO about Starlink for the past few days.
• He started a poll about buying the Irish airline and installing a boss named Ryan.
• But EU regulations would most likely prevent him from acquiring it.

Elon Musk has escalated his argument with Europe's biggest airline by polling X users on whether he should buy Ryanair.

His Monday post has received nearly 900,000 votes, with three-quarters voting in favor of Musk purchasing the Irish budget airline.

The poll also said he would "restore Ryan as their rightful ruler" — and this is not the first time Musk has quipped about installing an eponymous boss.

Ryanair is named after one of its cofounders, Tony Ryan. Since 1994, Michael O'Leary has been Ryanair's CEO.

His stake in the company is worth over 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion), but O'Leary is perhaps best known for his outspoken, provocative style.

Last Wednesday, O'Leary told Reuters that he wasn't interested in installing Starlink, Musk's satellite internet service.

It's been growing in popularity among airlines, but Ryanair is known for its no-frills offering, and O'Leary doesn't think customers would want to pay extra for it.

But Musk said O'Leary had the wrong numbers for the additional fuel costs due to the aerodynamic changes from installing a Starlink terminal.

The two billionaires then traded insults.

"Very wealthy, but he's still an idiot," O'Leary said on Irish radio, adding that Musk has "zero" knowledge of running an airline.

Musk then said O'Leary was an "utter idiot," called for his firing, and began talking about buying Ryanair.

The airline's social media team, which is known for its dry humor, then continued to annoy Musk.

Responding to reports about a widespread X outage, the Ryanair account posted on Friday: "Perhaps you need Wi-Fi @elonmusk?"

And on Monday, it jested that in-flight WiFi was an example of propaganda it wasn't falling for.

Musk then replied, "How much would it cost to buy you?" before beginning his poll.

This isn't the first time that Musk has polled X users about his business ventures.

Back in 2021, he ran a poll about selling 10% of his Tesla stock. More famously, he ran several about Twitter in 2022.

That included 70% of 2 million voters saying Twitter did not "rigorously adhere" to free speech, and 4.4 million users voting on an edit button.

Musk then bought the platform for $44 billion and later renamed it X.

Meanwhile, Ryanair has a market cap of nearly $36 billion — a fraction of Musk's $681 billion net worth.

However, it's highly unlikely he could acquire it.

Ireland is part of the European Union, whose laws require airlines to be majority-owned by EU nationals or member states.

Aviation is a highly regulated sector. The rules are even stricter in the US, which says foreign ownership cannot exceed 25%.