In a world that increasingly resembles a dumpster fire fueled by vanity and venture capital, we find ourselves subjected to the latest high-altitude spat between two men who have turned being insufferable into a trillion-dollar asset class. Elon Musk, a man who currently treats the platform formerly known as Twitter like a digital Ouija board for his own ego, has signaled to his army of blue-checked sycophants that he might consider buying Ryanair. Why? Because Michael O’Leary—the only man in Europe capable of making a budget flight feel like a trans-Atlantic bus ride in a medieval plague cart—dared to poke the Technoking.

This is not news; it is a psychiatric evaluation of a species that allows its transportation infrastructure and digital town squares to be governed by the whims of toddlers with private jets. Musk’s ‘poll’ asking if he should buy the Irish airline is the peak of our collective intellectual bankruptcy. It is the democratization of delusion. We are invited to watch as one man, who managed to turn a $44 billion social media empire into a digital toxic waste dump in record time, contemplates acquiring an airline that has spent thirty years perfecting the art of charging human beings for the privilege of not being physically assaulted by the upholstery.

The irony is so thick you could choke on it, much like the recycled air in a Ryanair cabin. Musk, the self-anointed savior of free speech and Martian colonization, is locking horns with O’Leary, a man whose business model is built on the premise that customers are a necessary nuisance to be milked for every cent. O’Leary is a pioneer in the field of organized misery; he is the man who once suggested charging passengers to use the onboard toilets. He is, in many ways, the spiritual ancestor of Musk’s ‘X Premium’—a way to extract wealth from the desperate while providing the absolute bare minimum in return.

To analyze this spat is to stare into the abyss of late-stage capitalism and realize the abyss is just a middle-aged billionaire posting memes. Musk’s move to ‘mull’ an acquisition via social media poll is a tactic designed to manufacture relevance. He doesn’t want an airline; he wants the dopamine hit of a thousand bots telling him he’s a genius. He wants to disrupt the airline industry the way he disrupted Twitter: by firing everyone who knows how things work and then wondering why the wings are falling off. Meanwhile, O’Leary, a man whose public persona is constructed entirely out of spite and cheap Guinness, represents the old guard of greed. He doesn’t care about the ‘future of humanity’ or ‘multi-planetary life.’ He cares about whether he can fit three more seats into a Boeing 737 by removing the flooring.

If Musk were to actually buy Ryanair, the result would be a terrifying synthesis of techno-feudalism and budget-travel austerity. Imagine a flight to Malaga where you have to pay a monthly subscription to use the oxygen mask, or where the pilot is replaced by an ‘FSD’ algorithm that occasionally mistakes a cloud for a brick wall. The cabins would be stripped of all physical controls, replaced by a single touchscreen that inevitably freezes just as you’re trying to deploy the landing gear. But don’t worry, the exterior of the plane would be wrapped in a Cybertruck-style stainless steel that adds three tons of weight and serves no aerodynamic purpose other than looking like a discarded kitchen appliance.

The tragedy here isn’t that these two men are fighting; it’s that they both represent the only two choices we seem to have left. We either succumb to the performative, ‘free speech’ chaos of the Silicon Valley narcissist or the cold, calculated, fee-driven misery of the corporate bean-counter. The Left will decry the billionaire class while still using the airline to go on their performative eco-tours, and the Right will cheer for Musk’s ‘disruption’ while being charged forty Euros for bringing a carry-on bag the size of a postage stamp.

Ultimately, this isn’t about aviation or economics. It’s about the fact that we live in a simulation where the most important decisions are made in the comments section of a dying social network. Whether Musk buys Ryanair or not is irrelevant. We are already his passengers, trapped in a pressurized tube of his making, hurtling toward a destination no one asked for, while Michael O’Leary waits at the gate to charge us for the exit. It’s a match made in a very specific, very profitable circle of hell. I’m just waiting for the engine failure.