That's me! Profanity laced language and printing money. God I love this guy.
Did you know we have almost identical DNA...except I was graced with exceptional cheek bones.
The F-Bomb-Dropping Airline CEO About to Earn a $100 Million-Plus Bonus
Profanity, off-color jokes and drunken dinners are all part of Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary’s lore
Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary in 2004, at the opening of a maintenance facility.
By Benjamin Katz, WSJ
Updated March 17, 2024
Last September, environmental protesters tossed a pie in the face of Michael O’Leary, the billionaire chief executive of Europe’s biggest airline.
The footage went viral. It was plastered across social media, aired by news stations across the continent and made headlines in the U.S.—unusual for an airline that doesn’t fly there. O’Leary’s wife, Anita, even caught a glimpse of it from a remote Spanish village during a trek along the ancient Catholic pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago.
For much of the next week, the coverage helped drive up the airline’s bookings by about 6%.
“The funny thing we’ve learned over the years is actually the bad publicity sells far more seats than the good,” O’Leary said in an interview. “A lot of people who have never heard of Ryanair suddenly google it and go: ‘Jesus, look at the air fares.’ ”
O’Leary’s run-in with an environmentalist protester in Brussels made headlines last September.
The 62-year-old CEO has been running Ryanair RYA -0.24%decrease; red down pointing triangle for the past 30 years—the longest tenure of any major airline boss—and has turned a paltry operation that flew 200,000 customers a year into a low-cost behemoth, with passenger numbers set to reach close to 200 million this year. The airline is dallying with Delta Air Lines for the title of the world’s most valuable airline.
That title isn’t just a badge of honor. O’Leary is on course to earn a bonus worth 100 million euros in stock options, equivalent to $109 million, later this year if the airline’s profit or stock price achieve certain targets, which were first set five years ago. Ryanair’s share price closed at a record high Friday.
“The obvious question is, well, is anybody worth 100 million over five years?” O’Leary said. “If premiership footballers are earning f—ing 20 million a year and [French soccer star Kylian] Mbappé is being paid 130 million to go play football for f—ing Real Madrid, then I think my contract is very good value for Ryanair shareholders.”
Aside from his propensity for foul language, O’Leary has regularly thrown mud on competitors, publicly bashed corporate partners, and clashed with his cabin crew and pilots—the latter of which he once referred to as “glorified bus drivers.”
Among its customers, Ryanair is renowned for its lack of leniency and is often ridiculed for the way it squeezes customers with extra fees, such as a $60 charge for failing to check in online.
“We love our customers, at least the 99% who obey all the rules,” O’Leary said. “But we don’t have much patience for the half a percent or 1% who don’t.”
How O’Leary built his empire is now part of the company lore. In the early 1990s, the Irish executive flew to Dallas to meet with the founder and then-CEO of Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher, who sold O’Leary on the radical new low-cost model he had pioneered.
As the legend goes, Kelleher met O’Leary for dinner near Dallas Love Field airport and laid out the low-cost playbook that would upend global aviation.
“In actual fact what happened was that Herb got drunk, I got twice as drunk, and I don’t remember very much of the dinner except waking up under the table at about 4 o’clock in the morning and Herb was still drinking,” O’Leary said.
Kelleher died in 2019 at age 87.
The true “road to Damascus” moment, O’Leary said, came as he watched Southwest’s planes arrive, disembark and pushback again all within 15 minutes, multiples faster than Ryanair’s teams were managing at the time.
“It was like a Formula One pit stop. Everybody descended on the plane, the passengers were off in 30 seconds, the next passengers were on and the plane was gone again,” he said.
By cutting down time on the ground, Ryanair could squeeze an extra two flights out of each of its aircraft every day. He stole some of Kelleher’s other ideas, too: Ryanair would only fly to less-congested airports that wouldn’t slow down the turnaround times; and luxuries such as spacious legroom and free meals were tossed out.
But Ryanair has more radically embraced Kelleher’s scriptures on cost, O’Leary said, criticizing Southwest’s treatment of its customers as “guests,” particularly a long-held policy to offer two free checked-in bags to all passengers. O’Leary said the policy leads to longer check-in and security lines, requires thousands of unnecessary staff and ultimately raises fares.
“Southwest has gone slightly middle-aged,” he said. “They want to be loved, whereas in Ryanair we want to be the lowest-cost, lowest-fare provider, we’re not that bothered whether people love us or not.”
Southwest Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson offered a different interpretation of Kelleher’s teachings: Keeping employees happy leads to returning customers, which in turn leads to happy investors.
“An airline jumps over the first two at its peril,” Watterson said in response to O’Leary’s comments about how Southwest runs its business. “From the very beginning, we aspired to be low cost, but never low service.”
Peers have also expressed respect for O’Leary’s single-minded commitment to the business model.
“Now, you may not like his methods, you may not like what he does, but my goodness he’s been a disruptor,” said Tim Clark, who has spent 21 years running Emirates, an airline whose superjumbos, first-class suites and onboard showers diametrically contrast Ryanair’s budget, short-haul operation. “He did not allow anything to disrupt his model and he’s vicious if anything gets in the way.”
Ryanair’s marketing strategy is also sculpted in the image of its off-color boss.
In the early 2000s, for instance, the carrier launched a salacious Valentine’s Day promotion that drew a slap on the wrist from regulators and some public consternation.
“Some poor Catholic priest from God-knows-where was out there saying that Ryanair was blaspheming,” O’Leary said of the promotion.
Media coverage of the outrage gave sales another boost.
The company’s marketing budget is about 20 million euros (“Most of which we don’t spend,” O’Leary said), whereas Southwest and Delta in recent years have annually spent more than $200 million and $300 million on advertising, respectively. A lot of the airline’s publicity is achieved with a team of 40 to 50 social media managers who run the accounts on TikTok, X and Instagram, and who are regularly lauded by other corporate brands for their viral, cheeky content.
“I have no idea what the hell they do, but my children tell me that our TikTok account is really cool,” O’Leary said. “We let them say anything, do anything, we don’t care who they offend, abuse, insult, tease.”
O’Leary’s leadership style isn’t all about stunts. He has become particularly renowned for buying aircraft at times of industry turmoil, allowing him to get them on the cheap.
In January 2002, he placed a major order with Boeing while the industry was still reeling from 9/11. In December 2020, he became Boeing’s first customer to place a major, firm order for the 737 MAX after the aircraft’s 20-month grounding. Later, when Ryanair was still in the throes of pandemic-era flight restrictions, the airline placed its biggest-ever order for up to 300 Boeing jets.
O’Leary has also offered to take any 737 MAX 10s that are left abandoned by United Airlines amid Boeing’s latest upheaval after a midflight blowout of a door panel on an Alaska Airlines flight in January.
He’s also made some “monumental screw-ups,” as he put it. A pilot shortage in 2017 sparked by a rival’s expansion led Ryanair to cancel more than 20,000 flights. After infamously pronouncing that “hell would freeze over” before his airline would recognize unions, O’Leary ultimately acquiesced.
The executive now credits his unions for enabling Ryanair’s rapid post-pandemic expansion, having facilitated negotiations to lower staff salaries by 20% in 2020 and allowing the carrier to make minimal staff redundancies. It meant the airline had crews ready to deploy when travel restrictions were lifted, while staffing shortages at rivals led to mass cancellations and delays.
O’Leary expects Ryanair’s share of the European market to rise from 20% to 30% over the next decade.
“I was the most anti-union [boss] for the first 30 years in the history of this company. I now fully accept that being unionized is a better way of dealing with that number of employees,” he said.
Ryanair controls about 20% of the European market, O’Leary said. He expects that to rise to 30% over the next decade.
“I’m not that interested in whether we’re the biggest airline in the world, as long as we’re the most profitable,” he said.
Write to Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com
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