Musk & O'Leary engage in X-based battle of the bastards

There was a time when billionaires were keen to manage their public image, fearful of having the wealth they stole instead redistributed among those that actually produced it. John D. Rockefeller famously handed out dimes to children as a means of burnishing his reputation. Elon Musk, in contrast, has his generative Ai machine to undress children.

For a few decades post-1945, the spread of social democracy at least constrained extreme personal wealth, even if it didn’t eradicate it. Now, however, with neoliberalism at its peak — or perhaps nadir — the ultra-rich feel unhindered in revealing at every opportunity how obnoxious they truly are.

The latest act of guillotine encouragement comes from the worst double act since World War 1 and the Spanish Flu — it’s Nazi Elon Musk bickering with the tedious gammon that is Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary. The spat started last week when O’Leary poo-pooed the idea of using Musk’s Starlink satellite system as a means of delivering internet to passengers on Ryanair flights. In figures likely made up off the top of his head, he declared:

It comes with a 2% fuel ⁠penalty because of the weight and drag. We don’t think our ⁠passengers are willing to pay for WiFi for an average ⁠1-hour flight.

He continued:

I would pay no attention whatsoever to Elon Musk. He’s an idiot

An imaginative riposte from the X CEO followed, in which he upped the stakes by declaring O’Leary to be an “utter idiot“. Fake engineer Musk also had some hallucinated ‘science’ of his own, saying:

He is being misinformed. I doubt they can even measure the difference in fuel use accurately, especially for a one hour flight, where the incremental drag is basically zero during the ascent phase due to high angle of attack.

Musk ponders buying Ryanair as new plaything

The two monkeys have continued flinging their own faeces at each other until the latest development, in which Musk has pondered the idea of buying the famously atrocious airline. Pathological liar O’Leary will now take a break from checking if your bag is 1 millimetre larger than allowed, and hold a press conference to continue milking the publicity some more.

Ryanair claim to be running a sale of flights in Musk’s ‘honour’, which we’re not going to promote here. However, given they were already marketing air travel at the price now being touted, this is likely just another con from the hated carrier.

This debacle serves as a further reminder that essential infrastructure is in the hands of the most loathsome people on the planet. Aviation and internet messaging systems (of which X is one) are key to the operation of modern societies. Yet, rather than being publicly managed and run for the good of all, they are simply the playthings of those who have stolen collectively generated wealth.

When boredom, vanity or petulance drives a new acquisition for the likes of Musk, they are free to run these services into the ground with no meaningful oversight.

X has infamously become essentially one long online Nuremberg rally since the man raised in apartheid South Africa took over. He was a keen advocate of AI generated child porn until eventually relenting under public pressure. Lately he’s been using the platform to advocate for ICE’s continued rampage across the US.

For O’Leary’s part, he’s managed to achieve the distinction of 1.3 out of 5 stars for Ryanair on TrustPilot. One recent review says:

Only gave a 1 [star] because there’s no option to leave 0.

Slide towards enshittification embodied by X and Ryanair

The airline isn’t much better for his own staff, as they rate it a 3.3 on Glassdoor, a site used by employees to review their workplace. Ryanair’s marketing model is unquestionably based on the notion that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Their X account embraces their awful reputation, dishing out insults to their own customers. The message is “we know we’re shit, you know we’re shit, and that’s how we can be so cheap”.

The hope is that the low pricing paired with having a bit of craic with punters will ensure people keep tolerating the horrible experience of Ryanair flights, from crappy legroom to staff incentivised to harass passengers.

Should we tolerate it, though? Should we accept that we’ve all been pauperised by the billionaire class, and now have to put up with miserable service in myriad ways because that’s all we can afford, or all that’s on offer in a fake free market? All while those responsible treat it like a game they can play out unashamedly in front of our eyes.

To add to his loathsomeness, O’Leary is a denier of climate breakdown, and Ryanair burns £3.71 billion of kerosene yearly. Musk is a major contributor too, via data centres powering X AI Grok, and his obsession with reaching other planets instead of preserving this one.

Our collective survival depends on terminating an economic system that allows the least moral to accrue the most power. Where are the guillotines? Time to get to it, chop chop.