Ryanair, Musk launches survey on X to buy the low-cost carrier

Ryanair has been considering the installation of wifi on board its aircraft for some time. "We talk to operators all the time," explains Eddie Wilson, CEO of the low-cost carrier, at a conference in Milan, "we talked to Starlink recently. We've talked to Amazon, we've talked to the phone companies, some of them haven't started launching satellites yet, in time there will be different solutions, we're not against wifi on board. We are just against paying".

In fact, the low-cost carrier whose model is to keep costs as low as possible is looking for someone to pay for the installation of the wifi system.

How? 'You can invent a business model, maybe someone invents something that advertises and gets rid of the risk for us,' explains the CEO, 'or whatever, whatever the model is, because when you spend $5 billion on fuel a year and if that makes our fuel more expensive, even marginally more expensive, we don't do that. So let's create in a model with no additional passenger costs to keep our legendary fares low'.

"We believe our customers don't want to pay to have wifi on board," Wilson added, "so we are looking for a solution that doesn't cost us anything, we will be happy to talk to anyone who can provide it. So the satellite companies will have to find a model that compensates for this cost, and we would be happy to do that'.

Ryanair has a market value of around EUR 30 billion, according to Bloomberg, three times that of Germany's Lufthansa.

O'Leary, who over several decades turned the company into the largest low-cost airline in the region, is among the airline's top 10 shareholders.

He was recently awarded an important bonus package for achieving certain performance targets on the stock, which gained 55 per cent last year.