You could run an argument that Elon Musk and Michael O’Leary, the boss of Ryanair, deserve each other. They both have a very clear idea of their own unimpeachable genius as business leaders, and are not afraid to tell us about it. Direct and uncompromising, they share a worldview that seems to conflate power with provocation. However, the more pertinent question is: what have we done to deserve them?

Over the past few days, Musk and O’Leary have been engaged in a public altercation that is as unseemly as it is emblematic, both of them and of the times in which we live. It started when O’Leary said he wouldn’t be using Musk’s Starlink Wi-Fi network on his planes because the external antennae would cause drag on the aircraft, and thus increase fuel consumption.

This may seem like a reasonable position to take, but Musk has his own social network and a trigger finger to go with it, and was not going to let O’Leary get away with his assertion. And so, in the lingua franca of X, Musk posted that the Ryanair boss was “an utter idiot” and “a retarded t**t”, and urged the airline’s board to “fire this imbecile”.

O’Leary believes that X is a “cesspit”, so he used the old-fashioned........

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