Michael O’Leary: Ryanair’s cost-cutting king

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Speaker 1 A 31-year-old is slumped in a leather booth in a Dallas steakhouse, asleep or passed out. He wakes with a jolt, his head is pounding, his stomach churning.

Speaker 1 On the table, a graveyard of empty beer glasses. Across from him, a silver-haired Texan sits calmly sipping bourbon as if the night has just begun.

Speaker 1 They've been talking business, airlines specifically. I tell you, the older man says, it works.
The young man frowns, blinking at his notebook.

Speaker 1 His scribbles are barely legible, but one number stands out twenty five minutes. You're saying you can turn around a full plane in twenty five minutes? The Texan leans back unfazed.

Speaker 1 Yep, and so can you. I'll show you how.
The young man stares at the number on his page again. This wasn't just small talk.
This was the blueprint for a new kind of airline. Fast, lean, ruthless.

Speaker 1 It wouldn't just cut costs. It would rewrite the rules and make make him a fortune.

Speaker 6 I'm Zing Sing, and I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

Speaker 1 And I'm Simon Jack, and I'm the BBC's business editor.

Speaker 6 And this is Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast where we take a billionaire and we trace their story from zero to their first million and then on to a billion.

Speaker 1 And today we have someone who revolutionized European air travel.

Speaker 6 He is the billionaire boss behind Ryanair, Europe's biggest low-cost airline. His name is Michael O'Leary.

Speaker 1 He's blunt, he's bold, and he might have just added a fee you didn't see coming.

Speaker 1 He's turned a small regional airline into a 28 billion empire by doing one thing better than anyone else, cutting costs to the bone.

Speaker 6 From headline-grabbing publicity stunts to savage boardroom strategy, O'Leary doesn't just run Ryanair, he is Ryanair.

Speaker 1 But, believe it or not, he didn't start the company and he never wanted a career in aviation.

Speaker 6 And he's famous for speaking his mind and using expletives to do so. So some quotes in this episode may have to be edited.
Apologies to Michael.

Speaker 1 And we are talking about O'Leary today thanks to one of our listeners, John from Dublin, who asked us to look into this larger-than-life character.

Speaker 6 If you have any names you'd like to suggest, we'll share the details at the end of the show.

Speaker 1 But please, return your seat to the upright position, tray tables away. It's time to meet Michael O'Leary, the man, the myth, the walking PR stunt.

Speaker 1 Michael Gerard Joseph Mary O'Leary, talk about covering your bases, was born the 20th of March 1961 in County Cork, Ireland.

Speaker 1 He was the second son of six children of homemaker Gerr and entrepreneur Ted O'Leary, who both came from prosperous farming families.

Speaker 6 Michael's father, Ted, started various businesses, including a textile business and a pet food business, and the family moved houses a few times as a result.

Speaker 6 Now, Michael doesn't reveal many details about his family in early childhood, but he said, My father was great at starting businesses but rubbish at running them.

Speaker 6 By the 1970s, they lived near Mullinger in the countryside to the west of Dublin.

Speaker 1 A young 13-year-old O'Leary started boarding at Clongowes, one of Ireland's most prestigious Jesuit schools, housed in a 13th-century castle, sometimes referred to as the Eaton of Ireland, the famous British public school which has educated royalty and gentry for centuries.

Speaker 6 O'Leary said he loved the school but admitted he was an average pupil. He said, I wasn't precocious but I was always a loudmouth.
In my first year I used to get killed by the six years.

Speaker 6 Boarding school is very good in that it teaches you to shut up occasionally. I wonder if he's learnt that lesson.

Speaker 1 Very occasionally I would say. In 1979 O'Leary began studying for a degree in business and economics at Trinity College Dublin.

Speaker 1 His parents gave him £30 a week to live on, quite a lot actually for a student at that time. That was about a third of an average weekly wage in Ireland at that time.

Speaker 1 He'd also worked shifts at the bar at his uncle's hotel. By the time he graduated, he'd said he'd accumulated £5,000.
Most people come out in debt. He'd actually racked up some money.

Speaker 6 Yeah, not bad going for a university student. He said he spent the first two years at uni drinking and chasing girls, but he did knuckle down in his final year.

Speaker 6 He said, I wanted to make money because we had financial problems when I was growing up. I would have murdered, I would have gone through concrete walls to make money.

Speaker 6 I mean, he definitely has a way with words, doesn't he?

Speaker 1 He does. And also, I mean, what an interesting thing to have managed to sort of save money while at university does give you, and that quote gives you an idea about what's driving this guy.

Speaker 1 After graduating, he secured a trainee accountant position, pretty valuable opportunity back in 1983. Ireland, along with the most of Europe, was battling or coming out of a recession at that time.

Speaker 1 But although O'Leary knew he needed to learn accountancy to help him make money or count it, he had no interest in climbing the ladder at the accountancy firm.

Speaker 1 He felt there wasn't enough money in it and the work was dull.

Speaker 6 So in 1985, after only 18 months, he left the accountancy firm. He wanted to buy a pub, but he couldn't afford it.

Speaker 6 But with savings from his salary and university and a £25,000 overdraft from a local bank, he did buy a news agent in a suburb of Dublin.

Speaker 6 As the interest was high on personal overdrafts, 28% at the time, he was determined to pay it back quickly. So he worked in the shop himself from 7 a.m.
to 11 p.m. every day to maximize takings.

Speaker 1 So one story he's told a few times is how he opened the shop on Christmas Day, roping in some of his sisters and brothers to help.

Speaker 1 He knew that demand, because everything else would be shut, would be high. He charged three times the normal price for batteries and chocolates.

Speaker 1 A normal day's turnover would usually be a thousand pounds, but on that Christmas day, he took in £14,000.

Speaker 1 So rinsing and squeezing every last drop of money out of a business is a habit he starts early.

Speaker 6 Now, after two years, he ran a handful of shops and had made £200,000, but he was already looking for a new project. So he sold up and he invested in property.

Speaker 6 And although that brought in a profit, O'Leary now wanted to learn from someone who was operating on a completely different level in the business world.

Speaker 1 So in 1987, he approached Tony Ryan, a successful Irish entrepreneur who had founded Guinness Pete Aviation in the 1970s, which had grown into the world's largest commercial aircraft leasing company, big business aircraft leasing.

Speaker 1 Tony Ryan had also co-founded Ryanair in 1985 with a capital of a million pounds, a staff of 57 and one 15-seater plane. The airline was founded by three men.

Speaker 1 Only one of them got their name on the side of that plane. There was no doubt who was calling the shots there.

Speaker 1 I have to say, I know very little about Tony Ryan, which is odd because everyone knows Ryanair so well.

Speaker 6 I know he seems to have somewhat faded into the distance now that he's been completely taken over in terms of personality by

Speaker 6 Michael Leary.

Speaker 1 But I think in Ireland he's well known as a kind of rags to riches kind of tycoon.

Speaker 1 And he's obviously his name is the one on the side of the plane.

Speaker 6 And it's a very good pub quiz answer as well. What is the origin of the name of Ryanair?

Speaker 1 Yeah, good one.

Speaker 6 O'Leary had previously worked with Ryan during his time as a trainee accountant, and Ryan had been impressed by this trainee.

Speaker 6 And he was actually so impressed that he offered O'Leary a job at GPA, but O'Leary declined it because he didn't want to become just another cog in a large corporate machine.

Speaker 6 That is an attitude very common with our billionaires. Now, however, O'Leary proposed a bold idea.

Speaker 6 So he would work as Ryan's personal financial advisor for no salary, just 5% of any money that Ryan made in a year.

Speaker 1 It's one of those kind of, you know, big gambles that could pay off big time or it could end up with him having nothing. Again, high risks, another attribute of many of our billionaires.

Speaker 1 Tony Ryan agreed, but there was a problem. Ryanair wasn't making any money.
It was bleeding it, in fact. Back then, it wasn't the no-frills airline we know today.

Speaker 1 It had tried to go head-to-head, compete with Aer Lingus, which was the biggest, the most established airline in Ireland. Ryanair offered a full service but at slightly lower fares.

Speaker 1 If there were ever delays, the passengers got free food and drinks, which was nice for customers, terrible for the bottom line. So by 1987, Ryanair had racked up losses of more than £2 million.

Speaker 6 Now, after a few months of working with Ryan, O'Leary joined Ryanair and was tasked with helping stem those losses. But by 1989, the airline was still losing money.

Speaker 6 And now, at this point, O'Leary's advice to Ryan was to close down Ryanair. He went so far as to call the airline a bottomless pit for Tony's money.

Speaker 6 O'Leary later told the Financial Times, I recommended very strongly that they shut it down because it would never ever make any money, which goes to show my lack of basic foresight.

Speaker 1 If they had shut it down, I've got a feeling that Michael O'Leary would have found a way to make some money anyway, whether it was in this airline or another.

Speaker 1 Well, that is purely hypothetical, of course, because Ryan didn't shut down Ryanair and he wanted O'Leary to stay. So he agreed on the condition he'd earned 25% 25% of any profits over £2 million.

Speaker 1 And, and this is crucial, I think, that he was given more freedom to make cost-saving decisions. O'Leary said, I thought in a good year we'd make a couple of million and I get 250 grand.

Speaker 1 But at that stage, it was just as likely to go bust as it was to make a million quid.

Speaker 6 One of O'Leary's first moves was to sit in on field contract meetings and he didn't hold back. One executive said he was very confrontational, cursing and swearing, quite bizarre behaviour.

Speaker 6 But his unconventional approach somehow worked. O'Leary managed to negotiate suppliers into giving Ryanair almost the same fuel rates as British Airways, despite their smaller size.

Speaker 1 And the cost of fuel, absolutely crucial to an airline. When it goes up, airlines begin to lose money and they're put on prices.

Speaker 1 It's one of the biggest, if not the biggest, single cost item for an airline is the fuel, apart from the leasing of the aircraft.

Speaker 6 So if you managed to negotiate those rates down.

Speaker 1 It's absolutely key. So that would have been a really, really important moment for the company.

Speaker 1 In 1991, O'Leary moved from Ryanair's administrative headquarters to the Airlines offices at Dublin Airport. So he'd get a better understanding of where exactly he could make more cuts.

Speaker 1 First, he outsourced a large amount of the catering to another company. What catering, you might ask these days.
Next, he cut the pay of the pilots by up to 37%.

Speaker 1 Those cuts meant some pilots' wages were lower than the average industrial wage. But the pilots' union said they accepted the cuts under threat of job losses.

Speaker 1 So it's basically, you know, take these cuts or go somewhere else.

Speaker 6 So the cuts were helping, but Tony Ryan wasn't convinced it was enough to save the airline.

Speaker 6 So in 1992, he sent O'Leary to Dallas, Texas, to meet Herb Kelleher, who's the legendary CEO of Southwest Airlines, who had pioneered a low-cost airline model in the United States.

Speaker 6 Now, O'Leary and Kelleher sat down for dinner and got roaring drunk, and O'Leary ended up passed out under the table.

Speaker 1 This is the thing where we came in on this episode.

Speaker 6 Exactly. And he came to at 3 a.m.
in the morning and Kelleher was still drinking. Now somewhere in the chaos of that drunken meeting, O'Leary learnt Kelleher's driving principle.

Speaker 6 Efficiency is everything.

Speaker 1 So if you want to revolution your business, go get a blind drunk with some vague recollection of what the conversation was last night. Good advice, sensible advice.

Speaker 6 Some people say that's an inefficient way of getting business insight.

Speaker 1 But anyway, these savings meant things like no more free meals, just snacks and drinks that passengers could buy rather than given, fly to smaller airports with cheaper landing charges.

Speaker 1 And they kept plane maintenance costs low by flying one class of plane only, the Boeing 737. So you've only got one thing to think about.
It's all very simple.

Speaker 1 The next day, O'Leary witnessed Southwest turn their planes around in, remember, 25 minutes. That's much faster than the usual hour and a half, 90 minutes.

Speaker 1 And Kelleher likened it to a 4-in-1 pit stop in many ways. The quicker the turnaround meant planes could fly more routes in one day.

Speaker 1 And Kelleher explained these efficiencies allowed Southwest to offer low ticket prices, prices undercut the competition increased the number of people you're taking and O'Leary later told the Financial Times it was like the road to Damascus or somewhere near Damascus

Speaker 6 this this was the way to make Ryanair work I wonder what made the Southwest CEO decide to meet up with Michael O'Leary in my experience chief executives love people coming to them that's like if you're the oracle and for people to worship at the feet right there isn't a CEO in my experience who doesn't like the question why are you so great now back in Ireland O'Leary wasted no time putting Kelleher's efficiencies into action and this is really fascinating because I think this really explains a lot about how this airline works if you've ever been on a Ryanair flight.

Speaker 6 So to speed up turnaround times he had cabin crew clean the planes instead of contract cleaners. Toilets were emptied only after several flights, not every time.

Speaker 1 Well nice.

Speaker 6 Free meals also scrapped, allowing the number of flight attendants to be cut in half from six to three.

Speaker 6 And the flight attendants could now use that time that was freed up from organising and serving free meals to sell snacks and duty-free instead.

Speaker 6 A former Ryanair advisor recalls just how focused and hands-on O'Leary was.

Speaker 6 He was always there early in the morning, he was always there late in the evening, and helping out with the baggage candlers on Sunday.

Speaker 6 He played football with the staff, and he didn't seem to have any personal life outside it.

Speaker 1 Well, there's another characteristic we've seen time and again: whether it's our tech bros who are sleeping on the floor on the bean bags, they're there the whole time.

Speaker 1 So, in 1992, Ryanair began slashing its prices. It was offering £29 fares on their Dublin to London Stansted flight.
That's less than half of the average £80 being charged by rivals. And it worked.

Speaker 1 Demand soared so quickly, the airline had to double its daily flights from 12 to 24. Passengers flocked to this low-cost option.
Ryan's market share jumped from 15% in 1991 to over 25% in 1992.

Speaker 1 So that's in just a year. By keeping costs low and planes full, profits climbed too, rising from £850,000 in 1992 to nearly £2 million, £1.9 million the following year.

Speaker 1 So in a way, this is kind of like the Walmart of Airlines. Pilot high, sell it cheap.

Speaker 6 Exactly. And on the 1st of January 1994, aged only 33 years old, Michael O'Leary was appointed as CEO of Ryanair.
And now that he was in charge, he wasted no time in making even more changes.

Speaker 6 So within weeks of taking the helm, he snapped up six second-hand Boeing 737s. These are the same planes used by the Southwest Airlines.

Speaker 6 These new planes had an extra 20 seats each, so increased capacity, and their longer range would later allow Ryanair to offer non-stop charter flights to southern Europe.

Speaker 1 But O'Lury first wanted to grow Ryanair's footprint in the UK and to do it cheaply.

Speaker 1 So, to keep costs down, he negotiated with airports like Prestwick in Scotland to waive all landing, passenger, and air traffic control charges. Quite a big thing for them to concede.

Speaker 1 They risked losing £650,000 Presswick the first year and got called out for economic suicide by some, but they agreed to the deal in the hope it would increase passenger numbers.

Speaker 1 Because the other way that airports make money is simply footfall and retail opportunities and all that kind of stuff. So the more passengers you get in, the more money you make through that channel.

Speaker 6 Exactly. Flights to Presswick launched in April 1994.
And a year later, that all-important passenger traffic was up 118%. So the gamble paid off.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So other traditional airlines were watching this and they started offering cheap fares too, but O'Leary spotted a flaw in their offer.
The cheapest tickets often had restrictions.

Speaker 1 You can't travel on this day, you can't travel on that day.

Speaker 1 Some fares were only available if bought 14 days in advance and other cheap fares stipulated travelers stayed the Saturday night in their destination.

Speaker 6 So this is a way to offer discounts to people who are traveling for leisure, for holidays, right?

Speaker 6 But not for business travelers because those people usually want to return home before the weekend and they are willing to pay for that.

Speaker 6 So O'Leary decided Ryanair would remove a lot of these restrictions and allow anyone and everyone to buy cheap tickets for their journeys.

Speaker 1 Soon Ryanair had 30% market share of Ireland to UK flights. The low fares were changing how people approach UK air travel.
Some people were actually now commuting to work across the Irish Sea.

Speaker 1 The Sun newspaper reported one computer worker caught the 8.25am Ryanair flight from Birmingham to Dublin, then the return flight at 6.25pm three days a week.

Speaker 1 And it also made it easier for large groups to block book, like when the entire cast of Riverdance all flew home from London to Dublin for Christmas, or these days, sometimes you'll be on the plane with a stag party going to somewhere in Eastern Europe, and that kind of thing.

Speaker 6 So, by 1995, Ryanair's reported profits had grown from £2 million to £5 million.

Speaker 6 That figure was later revised to £12 million.

Speaker 6 Thanks to O'Leary's profit share deal, remember that one, he earned 25% of any profits over £2 million.

Speaker 6 So, Michael O'Leary, now in his mid-30s, was a millionaire, and Ryanair was no longer just a scrappy underdog who was fighting to stay alive. It was now a serious player.

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Speaker 1 So now let's take Michael O'Leary from a million to a billion. Now that Ryanair is finally profitable, the founder Tony Ryan began preparing for a stock market flotation.

Speaker 1 It's a chance to start cashing in on Tony Ryan's original £20 million investment.

Speaker 1 But the IPO wouldn't benefit Michael O'Leary directly despite all his efforts and his involvement and the dramatic turnaround. He was still just an employee.

Speaker 1 He's got no shares, no ownership of the company. To change that, O'Leary needed to negotiate a stake in the company before that sale of shares.

Speaker 6 O'Leary's existing profit share agreement was now becoming unwieldy. So by 1997, it already netted him £17 million in total.

Speaker 6 Worse, once Ryanair went public, this deal would have to be disclosed in IPO filings, which would potentially spark criticism or controversy.

Speaker 6 So in a strategic move, O'Leary decided to give up this lucrative bonus arrangement. In return, he bought an 18% stake in Ryanair Holdings for a nominal £900,000 as part of a complex restructuring.

Speaker 6 Basically, he's getting quite a good deal from this.

Speaker 1 A big slice of the company. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in that negotiation because that is the beginning of his real fortune.

Speaker 1 Anyway, on the 29th of May 1997, Ryanair floated, sold shares on both the Dublin and the New York stock exchanges. Michael O'Leary's stake was diluted to about 14%.

Speaker 1 Sometimes they sell extra shares if there's appetite for them, which can push down the value of your stake, but it was still worth around £37 million back in 97.

Speaker 1 By late 1998, the continued growth pushed its market value to £700 million.

Speaker 1 And that same year, aged 37, O'Leary made the Sunday Times rich list for the first time with an estimated fortune of £114 million.

Speaker 6 God, as someone who's literally just turned that exact same age, hearing that ends was a real kick in the teeth.

Speaker 1 I think if you're going to compare yourself to the people we talk about every episode, that's a recipe for misery, isn't it?

Speaker 6 Yeah, this is very true.

Speaker 1 We should just reflect on the fact that this is amazing because, in a way, he's managed to amass a massive stake in an airline without actually putting any of his own money in.

Speaker 1 Now, sometimes people beg, borrow, and steal. They max out their credit cards.
They'll ask their family and friends for money to amass a small stake, which then grows.

Speaker 1 He, through his cost-cutting and turning around, has managed to wangle himself a large stake in a very big airline through sheer operational, could say, brilliance or ruthlessness.

Speaker 6 A chutzpah, really.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, nerve is not something Michael O'Leary lacks, having met him a few times. Maybe I'll save a few of those stories.
You save a few of the anecdotes for later.

Speaker 6 But yeah, it does seem like for someone who initially didn't want to join Tony Ryan for fear of becoming a cog in a corporate machine, he has now become the biggest cog in the the corporate machine.

Speaker 1 And also, there was something big going on in air travel across the European Union.

Speaker 6 Yes, exactly. In the same year that Ryanair went public, they liberalised air travel.
Any European airline could fly any route within the EU. And Ryanair saw this opportunity and pounced on it.

Speaker 6 So they unveiled plans to expand its fleet. They launched seven new routes almost overnight.
These included Dublin to Beauvoir, Paris, Brussels, Charleroi, and Stansted to Skavster near Stockholm.

Speaker 6 O'Leary initially steered clear of crowded holiday hotspots like Spain. Instead, he was focusing on connecting these overlooked cities with London and Dublin.

Speaker 1 But these airports were sometimes mocked in the press or on comedy shows for being quite a long way from the cities advertised.

Speaker 1 Skavska, for example, is a hundred kilometers away from Stockholm Centre and takes around an hour and 15 minutes in a cab.

Speaker 1 But a former sales manager for Ryanair explained, Skavska might have been in the middle of nowhere, but Stansted wasn't. And that was the key.
London is a huge magnet for foreign tourists.

Speaker 1 So, if you get to, I mean, Stanstead is, what is it, 20, 30 miles outside of London? But there's a quick train you can get in into the, right into the heart.

Speaker 1 So, if you're flying to London, you are flying to London.

Speaker 6 And if you are flying into an airport that is a bit further away from the centre of town, you know, presumably that also means huge economic opportunities for that bit of the city. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 But some of this cost-cutting, you know, you can't cut and cut and cut without the pip squeaking at some point.

Speaker 6 No, exactly. So, by 1998, Ryanair was pleasing the markets with increasing profits.
Some of their staff however were not so happy.

Speaker 6 To speed up turnaround times Ryanair's baggage handlers had to move bags by hand instead of using conveyor belts and that led to frequent back injuries with no sick pay.

Speaker 6 And in January the baggage handlers staged a three-hour strike demanding better pay and union recognition.

Speaker 6 Now this was the airline's first ever industrial action and the dispute between the handlers escalated when 2,000 airport staff in the same union also went off duty, shutting down Dublin airport on the 7th of March 1998.

Speaker 6 And this is a big deal, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, in fact, it's such a big deal that the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, Taoisook is like the Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, he had to intervene.

Speaker 1 According to Alan Ruddock's book, Michael O'Leary, A Life in Full Flight, the Taoiseach asked O'Leary to come to their offices, but O'Leary told them no. plus a few expletives.

Speaker 1 Eventually, O'Leary agreed to talk on the phone. It's quite ballsy, though, isn't it? Prime Minister, of course, you're on the phone, you say, come down and talk to me.
He says, no.

Speaker 1 Anyway, they hammered out out a deal which would see the baggage handlers abandon industrial action if Ryanair signed up to an inquiry into the dispute.

Speaker 1 He agreed to that, but he refused to move an inch on union recognition.

Speaker 1 And that marked the start of a pretty tense relationship with Bertie O'Hare and the Taoiseach, with O'Learyer later saying, I'm disrespectful of authority. No kidding.

Speaker 6 So by 1999, O'Leary decided Ryanair finally needed a website. So yes, if you've been following the story until now, they're selling tickets the old-fashioned way without a website.

Speaker 1 Hard to imagine that time now, and yet it's certainly in my lifetime.

Speaker 6 Well, Mike O'Leary decided Ryanair needed a website. Now, he held off for a few years until he felt the software to issue these paperless tickets was reliable, so no more tickets in the post.

Speaker 6 But now, he wanted a website quickly and cheaply, the O'Leary way. The first quotes from developers came in at £3 million, which O'Leary instantly dismissed.

Speaker 1 And then he probably threw the person out of the room if they were in there. So, £3 million, you've got to be joking.

Speaker 6 With a few swear words, and then Ryanair's HR director remembered two interns who worked last summer at his old computing company and rung them up.

Speaker 1 Yes, the then 17-year-old John Beckett took the call on his mobile while sitting in a classroom at secondary school.

Speaker 1 Beckett and his 22-year-old business partner and dentistry student managed to get the next day off school, university, respectively, and met O'Leary at his offices.

Speaker 1 Beckett listened to O'Leary explained what he wanted: a simple website to be completed in a month, and gave O'Leary a quote for 17,500 off the top of his head.

Speaker 1 O'Leary barted him down to £15,000 and Beckett agreed. Remember, this is a website for a major airline.

Speaker 1 Beckett said they appreciated this kid coming in in jeans and a t-shirt. That was very much in keeping with the Ryanair ethos at the time.
15 grand for a major airline website.

Speaker 1 I'd say that's a pretty good deal.

Speaker 6 I mean, I would say that John Beckett should have priced himself a little bit higher than that.

Speaker 6 Ryanair's management believed internet sales would only be a tiny part of its business, so they didn't even put contact details on the first iteration of the the website.

Speaker 6 So Beckett and his partner, the web designers credited on the site, kept getting emails about delayed flights. Must have been very annoying for them.

Speaker 6 But just months after launching, O'Leary saw how much traffic the site was getting and used the website to sell other products such as travel insurance, car hire and hotel rooms.

Speaker 6 And within a year, the website was handling three quarters of all their flight bookings.

Speaker 1 I think the rise of people buying everything on the internet moved much faster than people thought.

Speaker 1 I think a lot of people thought in the mid to late 90s that people would struggle to put in credit card details, you know, payment details.

Speaker 1 There was still that kind of like, well, who am I extending these details to? But people got over it really quickly and it's almost unthinkable now.

Speaker 1 And the idea you've got two kids in jeans and t-shirts designing this is a fabulous image to me. Anyway, in 2002, Ryanair wanted to expand its fleet of planes.

Speaker 1 And O'Leary sparked a bidding war between arch rivals Airbus and Boeing for the contract for 100 new planes. This ultimately pushed Boeing into offering Ryanair a steeply discounted deal.

Speaker 1 According to Alan Ruddock's reporting, whose book was very helpful in the preparation of this episode, the list price of a new Boeing was $60 million, but O'Leary barted them down to just over $28 million a plane.

Speaker 1 Not unusual for them to offer discounts on this because you often get the service contract to keep servicing them. That's quite lucrative, but that was a great deal.

Speaker 1 This aggressive negotiation saved the airline hundreds of millions, locked in low costs for customers for years. It was a classic O'Leary move that reinforced their sort of ultra-low-cost model.

Speaker 6 These new planes helped Ryanair increase their routes across Europe, including holiday destinations in Spain and Italy, they had previously avoided.

Speaker 6 And by the end of 2003, Ryanair had over 130 routes. Passenger figures had grown to 21 million.
Most of those people had booked their tickets online.

Speaker 1 Then in 2003, Michael O'Leary sold off some of his Ryanair shares, raising roughly £17 million.

Speaker 1 Part of the reason for that sale was to help pay for his wedding to Anita Farrell, a Dublin investment banker. The wedding reception took place in Gigginstown House.

Speaker 1 This is O'Leary's Georgian mansion and 200-acre estate. He bought the property a decade earlier in 1993, just before becoming Ryanair CEO.

Speaker 6 The country house was in Mullinger, which is near his parents and had a farm attached. It was in bad shape when he bought it, but his wedding gave him the perfect opportunity to give it a makeover.

Speaker 6 So he built a swimming pool, a new extension, a courtyard. The reception was attended by around 300 guests and the wedding reception was estimated to have cost him nearly a million pounds.

Speaker 6 Happy news, the couple are still together today and they have four children.

Speaker 1 I wonder if he charged his guest add-ons for every levery canopy and every sausage roll they wanted.

Speaker 6 Do you want towels in your room? That'll be an extra 50 quid. But by 2003, Ryanair was facing increasing competition from new low-budget airlines.
We mentioned EasyJet, so EasyJet launched in 1994.

Speaker 6 Founder Stelius Hajiwanu had also travelled to meet Herb from Southwest Airlines to learn the low-cost model, so herb becoming a bit of a guru there.

Speaker 6 In the 1990s, the two airlines serviced different routes, but by early 2003, they were becoming more direct competitors.

Speaker 6 And the surge in online booking meant customers were better able to search for the cheapest deals available on all the airlines.

Speaker 6 So going online has its benefits for the companies, but it also has benefits for the consumer.

Speaker 1 Yeah, those price comparison websites actually really matter in things like airline flights, don't they?

Speaker 6 Yes, exactly. And soon, Ryanair's shares were starting to slide.

Speaker 1 So O'Leary as usual searched for new ways to cut costs which included scrapping window shades on planes that delays take-off preparations as the staff open them or close them getting rid of magazine pockets that thing in front of you to reduce cleaning time in case anyone's left a moldy sandwich or some tissues or anything and only having non-reclining seats on new planes to save on repairs.

Speaker 1 I never realized it was to save on repairs. I know just so you could cram more people in, there'd be less legroom.

Speaker 6 And actually this is so funny because it really explains a lot of things that I've noticed about Ryanair planes when I've gotten on them and wondered to myself, like, why no window shades?

Speaker 6 Why can't we recline?

Speaker 1 And to outpace the competition, he didn't just cut costs, he dialed up the spectacle. We talked about him being a one-man PR machine.

Speaker 1 In 2003, Ryanair launched its rock bottom fares campaign, had full newspaper ads featuring two naked backsides and £9.99 tickets.

Speaker 1 The Telegraph reported 30,000 people booked flights off the back of those adverts alone.

Speaker 6 Soon the stunts got even bolder. O'Leary tried to row a World War II tank into Luton airport, flanked by staff in combat fatigues, to mock their rival EasyJet.

Speaker 6 Security shut it down, unsurprisingly, citing post-9/11 security protocols. By 2004, O'Leary was dressing as the Pope to preach the gospel of low fares.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 6 Subtlety, as you can tell, was never part of the strategy. It was free publicity for Ryanair.

Speaker 1 At this point, I think I should remember my personal run-ins with him during this period because

Speaker 1 I was working on Breakfast TV. We'd often have him come on because it would be telling us where are the hotspots for people, holiday, whatever, what's going on in the airline industry.

Speaker 1 Always very keen, being the BBC, that people shouldn't advertise their own whatever. He was much more commenting on the industry rather than on Ryanair itself.

Speaker 1 Nevertheless, when you got him there, he would then say, We've got one million seats for £9.99, another £2 million seats, whatever. I had to sort of shut him down on air.

Speaker 1 And afterwards, I would say, listen, Michael, you really can't do that.

Speaker 1 This BBC can't really do that sort of stuff. He said, all right, got you.
Okay.

Speaker 1 The next time he came on, he came on and he was standing outside Stansted Airport and he had a t-shirt printed with all the latest deals of Ryanair on, knowing that we couldn't go off him because he was just standing there.

Speaker 1 He was the interviewee. So there he was, a walking billboard, a walking advertising hoarding for his own airline.
At that point, you have to have a grudging respect for someone's nouse and chutzpah.

Speaker 6 Yeah, you really have to hand it to him. I mean, short of asking for the shit off his back, what could you do?

Speaker 1 And of course, at that time, you would often put to him the fact that although it was cheap, a lot of people thought the service was pretty bad.

Speaker 1 And he once said to me again, and I think he said this to a number of people, he said, oh, Simon, my flights are full of people who said they'd never fly Ryanair again.

Speaker 1 I'm taking people to Spain for a tenor. So he said, people want to be cheap.
But, you know, we'll see the evolution of that as time goes on.

Speaker 6 He reminds me quite a lot of one of our other billionaires, Richard Branson, where Branson became the virgin brand. And in a similar way, Michael O'Leary became Mr.
Reiner. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And even on his personal commute, Michael O'Leary pushed boundaries. This was a very big story at the time.

Speaker 1 In 2003, he paid 6,300 euros to register his own car, his Mercedes, as a taxi, so he could legally use Dublin's bus lanes, because the taxis are allowed to go in the bus lanes, to skip traffic jams.

Speaker 1 And when asked about this loophole, O'Leary told the Guardian newspaper, last time I checked, this was a democratic republic. As long as I pay my taxes, I'm free to do with my money what I like.

Speaker 1 Some people went, what a scoundrel. Other people went, fair play.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I think with behaviour like that, there's always a certain part of the population that will go, all right, I respect that.

Speaker 6 Anyway, with the company's pre-tax profits still falling by 14%, O'Leary did voluntarily cut his bonus by 44% to 127,000 euros.

Speaker 6 But by 2005, the cost cutting, the publicity stunts, they all finally paid off. Conditions at Ryanair had stabilized, and Michael had amassed an estimated fortune of £280 million.

Speaker 1 Over the next few years, though, O'Leary's cost-cutting and publicity stunts got even more extreme.

Speaker 6 Yes, so some of you may recall that in 2009, he announced Ryanair was considering standing seat tickets, which were vertical seats akin to bar stools with seat belts, of course, for £4.

Speaker 6 At the time, the BBC suggested Ryanair was announcing schemes that would never happen to use the press for publicity but a Ryanair spokesman denied it.

Speaker 6 The same year he also insisted Ryanair was serious about charging customers one pound to use on-bought toilets.

Speaker 6 He suggested the pay a pound to spend a penny plan could rake in £15 million a year for the airline and lower ticket prices further but I do not know how happy people would be about having to pay a pound to pee on a Ryanair plane.

Speaker 6 I think that these days he sort of admits that these were kind of just to get a rise and we all fell for it, you know, in the media everyone fell for it um but you know i wouldn't put it past him to sort of be serious about something like that after facing profit warnings in 2013 michael leary decided to rethink ryanair's strategy he admitted his intentionally acerbic public persona which he compared to a cartoon pantomime villain had alienated some customers who would have rather paid more to fly with his competitors he said we're probably moving from being what I would call errant teenagers into being somewhat more adult in the way we both interact with our customers and communicate with the outside world, he said of the plan.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because there was a feeling that Ryanair passengers sometimes thought they were being treated as cattle being herded on and off these planes.

Speaker 1 And at one point he thought that they wouldn't mind being treated like cattle as long as they were getting a very, very cheap deal.

Speaker 1 But their approach to customer relations matured over time and this new strategy was dubbed always getting better.

Speaker 1 It aimed to improve services for passengers and increase capacity to contend with European competitors. Because remember, the competitors were getting cheaper too.

Speaker 1 The price point was becoming, if you like, less of a weapon against the rivals.

Speaker 1 But the following year, Ryanair was more than tripling its target for additional passengers. It also slowly increased its fares.
Profits soon increased 66%

Speaker 1 to £613 million.

Speaker 6 So clearly, the new approach of always getting better worked.

Speaker 6 In 2015, Michael quipped that if he knew that treating passengers nicely would make his airline even more profitable, he'd have done it years ago.

Speaker 1 So that's relations with customers getting slightly better. What about workers? For years, Michael O'Leary was famously resistant to unions.

Speaker 1 He once dismissed pilots as glorified bus drivers, even saying that hell would have to freeze over before he'd negotiate with trade unions.

Speaker 1 But by 2017, a wave of pilots were leaving for better pay, better conditions, benefits at rival airlines, and it left Ryanair having to cancel thousands of flights, which put the remaining pilots in a pretty strong position to negotiate management's recognition of their union.

Speaker 1 And in order to stave off strikes around Christmas 2017 and losses, of course, to short-term revenue, the company did accept unionisation.

Speaker 6 But meanwhile, 2017 was a bit of a landmark year for Michael personally. He officially became a Euro billionaire, thanks mostly to his Ryanair shares and smart property investments.

Speaker 6 He owned several high-value properties, including estates in Ireland, luxury homes in Dublin, plus commercial office buildings across the UK.

Speaker 6 And beyond aviation, he'd also built another lucrative business, breeding and racing thoroughbred horses through his Gigginstown House stud, which had won prestigious titles like the two Cheltenham Gold Cups and the British Grand National.

Speaker 6 These are massive horse racing competitions in the UK. And in 2018, after winning the 600,000 Euro Grand National Prize, he even celebrated with passengers on a Ryanair flight.

Speaker 6 He bought everyone a drink, but with a cheeky reminder, one drink only.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's one drink only. Interesting.

Speaker 1 He won't be the first very rich Irishman to spend quite a lot of their money on horse racing. There's a very strong connection there.

Speaker 1 By 2018, Forbes officially named him a self-made billionaire, estimating his fortune at $1.1 billion,

Speaker 1 Forbes reports in dollars, cementing his status in both Euro, pounds, and dollars. Much of that wealth remains tied to his significant stake in Ryanair, which continues to fuel his financial rise.

Speaker 6 So, yes, let's take him beyond a billion.

Speaker 6 In 2019, Michael O'Leary secured a major new pay deal with Ryanair, which is an ambitious share option package worth up to 99 million Euro if the airline hits tough profit or share price targets.

Speaker 6 To get this, he gave up previous incentive schemes. He agreed to slash his salary and bonus down to 500,000 euros, playing the world's smallest violin here.

Speaker 6 Nearly half of Ryanair's shareholders opposed the deal, especially since the airline was already struggling with falling profits and looming strikes.

Speaker 6 But despite this backlash, O'Leary's contract was extended.

Speaker 1 By May 2025, it was reported he could earn over 100 million euros. That would have been one of Europe's largest ever corporate paydays.

Speaker 1 After Ryanair's shares stayed above a certain level, that's 21 euros for 28 consecutive days.

Speaker 1 The catch, he's got to stay with the company for a further three years, till July 2028, in order to collect that for the shares, the so-called vest, for him to own them fully.

Speaker 1 Critics say 100 million Euros is excessive, no kidding, especially compared to what most Ryanair staff earn, but O'Leary insists the pay reflects the value he's delivered to shareholders, even comparing himself to top football managers.

Speaker 1 We often have these things about whopping paydays and the shareholders have to vote on this. But the point is for them to make this kind of money, the shareholders will have to get much richer too.

Speaker 1 So usually they mean that if the share price goes from X to Y, those shareholders will have made a boatload of cash as well. So we have to make him rich for us to get rich.
Who cares?

Speaker 1 Elon Musk, classic case.

Speaker 6 Exactly. So, in 2023, Michael O'Leary flew to Belgium to deliver a petition to EU Chief Ursula von der Leyen about ongoing air traffic controller strikes hurting his airline.

Speaker 6 And it was there that he found himself cream-pied by a group of climate activists. O'Leary, however, didn't miss a beat.

Speaker 6 He cracked jokes and told reporters he loves cream cakes and they're actually his favourite. And that response perfectly captures his long-held belief that even bad press can be good for business.

Speaker 6 And with Michael O'Leary, the show always goes on. It sure does.

Speaker 1 But now let us judge him on a bunch of different categories. We're going to look at things like wealth, philanthropy, controversy, and have a look at his legacy.

Speaker 1 And we're going to score him between 0 and 10. We'll both take a view on that.
And then we'll throw the final question of whether he's a good, bad billionaire to you. So let us start then with wealth.

Speaker 1 And often we look at the kind of rags to riches. You know, do they come from a desperately poor background to their incredible wealth? And he doesn't qualify on that score, does he?

Speaker 6 No, so both on his mother's side and his father's side,

Speaker 6 prosperous farming families. You know, obviously, he attended what people call the Eaton of Ireland.

Speaker 6 I mean, in his defence, he is, you know, one of six kids and he didn't use any family money to help set up Ryanaw or become so successful.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what I think is interesting is that he managed to parlay just his technical and operational

Speaker 1 skill or ruthlessness into a stake. So he was a self-made man in the sense that he's developed a large stake in a very large airline without any kind of family money or the dowry or an inheritance.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and he doesn't know how to spend it as well, which is another point in his favor on the wealth category. You know, he's bought his sprawling country estate.

Speaker 6 He's spent a million on the wedding reception.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for someone so focused on cost minimisation, it's

Speaker 1 quite a contradiction there.

Speaker 6 Well, you know, maybe he just loves a big country estate wedding. Who doesn't?

Speaker 1 So in terms of overall wealth, in billionaire terms, he's entry-level

Speaker 1 compared to some of our people. So I don't think he scores very highly in billionaire stakes in wealth and neither in a kind of astonishing Rags to Riches story.
So I'm going to score him pretty low.

Speaker 1 I'm going to give him a two.

Speaker 6 Ooh, that is low. I was going to say maybe give him a three or a four.

Speaker 1 Well, because there is country estates and his racehorses. All right, you've talked me up to a three.

Speaker 6 Oh, you're too easily talked up. Okay, well, I'm going to go slightly slightly higher onto a four.
So, four from me, three from you. What about philanthropy?

Speaker 1 Well, it's getting difficult this because lots of billionaires don't often publicise charitable donations.

Speaker 1 That's either because they don't want to trade on their great philanthropy and be seen what a nice person I am, or they're just not doing it at all.

Speaker 1 When they are reported, they tend to be direct amounts for O'Leary to local charities, things he's interested in.

Speaker 1 These include 200,000 euros to a jockey's medical fund after a jockey was paralyzed after a a fall.

Speaker 1 There's 100,000 he won from his racehorses to a Belfast youth charity, 200 grand to help a reforestation project after wildfires in the Al Garve.

Speaker 1 I mean, all, you know, admirable in their own way. Compared to, you know, we just don't know is the point on this one.

Speaker 1 So I think, you know, for me, because we don't know, that, you know, the ones we do know about don't add up to much compared to, you know, hundreds of over a billion. So

Speaker 1 I'm going to give him a three question mark.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I think I'll just give him a two out of ten for this.

Speaker 1 What about controversy? No shortage of things to talk about here, though.

Speaker 6 No, exactly. He's got a long and storied history of accusations of offending people.
So, you know, in 2020, take for instance, there was an interview with The Times.

Speaker 6 He said that Muslim men should be profiled at airports because, in his words, that is where the threat is coming from. Oof, the Muslim Council of Britain said Mr.

Speaker 6 O'Leary's comments were racist and discriminatory. Ryan Eyre later claimed O'Leary was only calling for more effective airport security checks, but you know, the list of alleged offences only goes on.

Speaker 6 In 2012, he described passengers who forgot to print their boarding passes as, in his words, idiots.

Speaker 6 He was trying to explain he hadn't actually insulted a customer complaining about a fee for not printing off her boarding pass.

Speaker 6 He said, I was not calling her stupid, but all those passengers are stupid who think we will change our policies or our fees. So that is, I would say, a non-apology.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we should mention the environment because obviously the proliferation of low-cost airlines, the so-called democratisation of air travel meant lots of people getting on planes and that has an environmental impact.

Speaker 1 Comments he made about Ryanair's environmental impact were the subject, in fact, of a BBC Newsnight investigation in 2007, which found that O'Leary falsely stated that Ryanair had cut emissions of carbon dioxide by half over five years.

Speaker 1 After initially threatening legal action against the programme, O'Leary admitted he had made an error.

Speaker 6 And of course there is the controversy around O'Leary's pay, which we alluded to previously in the episode. You know, he's faced a lot of criticism for those lucrative payouts.

Speaker 6 And this is quite the statement. In 2024, he said he wouldn't be putting up with any of that muling nonsense from city types that would be railing against excessive executive pay.

Speaker 6 And this is really interesting because he cites the amount that footballers are paid as an example of what he perceives to be this double standard when it comes to his payouts.

Speaker 6 He said, footballers are getting half a million a week, yet some guy running a serious business employing 20,000 plus people gets paid five or £10 million and it's suddenly excessive.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there does seem to be a double standard on that. There's also the issue of Ryanair customer service.

Speaker 1 Ryanair has often in the past been ranked last in the Witch annual survey of UK brand customer service. Respondents call the airline greedy, sneaky and arrogant.

Speaker 1 I would refer you to the comment he made to me saying, my planes are full of people who say they'd never fly Ryanair again.

Speaker 6 Ah, they come crawling back.

Speaker 1 They were also fined for the years over by customer service, including in 2014 for misselling travel insurance, in 2015 for their premium rate customer phone line, and by the Spanish government in 2023 for abusive practices, including charging for hand luggage.

Speaker 6 So a long and storied list of controversies spanning the gamut from environmental to offence to obscene pay packages.

Speaker 1 You know for a fact that the higher score we give him on controversy, the more he would actually like it.

Speaker 6 So you're revising your figure down?

Speaker 1 I don't know if I'm revising it down or up.

Speaker 1 The thing is, he's used his own personality to great effect to create the size of this airline and his own personal wealth.

Speaker 1 So for him, I think controversy has been an asset rather than a liability, as he would consider it.

Speaker 1 So for better or worse, I'm going to give him an eight.

Speaker 6 I think an eight is about right, given the fact that he seems to revel in it almost.

Speaker 1 He hasn't killed anyone, you know, hasn't done anything illegal. He's not one of our drug dealers or one of our

Speaker 1 arms traders. So yeah, I'll give him an eight.
And that's pretty high for the kind of what I would consider consistent low-level controversy.

Speaker 6 Now, what about power and legacy? How has Ryanair and Michael O'Leary changed the face of the aviation landscape?

Speaker 1 Well, he is one of the pioneers of low-cost budget airline travel. And as we know from our own story that we've just been telling here, he didn't invent that idea.

Speaker 1 Nevertheless, Ryanair is now the biggest airline in Europe.

Speaker 1 and you know there is no doubt that you know putting people on planes for a 10 quid did make massive change and he brought the overall level of cost down across the industry.

Speaker 1 So I you know I just don't think you can really

Speaker 1 overemphasize what a big figure he is in this. So I you know I'd score him highly on legacy.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I mean there's a whole string of European holiday destinations that probably didn't exist in the 80s or the early 90s before Ryanair started flying out to them.

Speaker 6 I mean, they probably maybe would have been served by other low-cost airlines when those started up, like EasyJet, but Ryanair was really the airline that pioneered travel and it probably boosted those places' economies too.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and what's interesting is when we've been through recessions over the last 20 years now,

Speaker 1 you always think the one thing that's going to go is foreign travel. That would be a discretionary thing.
That is one of the last things people give up. They've gotten used to it.

Speaker 1 It is something they consider almost like a kind of, you know, a right to go on a foreign holiday, which definitely wasn't the case case 20 or 30 years ago but you know obviously um environmental impact more flying means more emissions so for better and worse i think he has really you know changed the airline industry for good and bad i mean i would score him really highly on this actually i would say paranex i'm going to give him a massive one i'm going to say i'm going to give him a nine I think a nine out of ten is exactly right.

Speaker 1 Okay. And then final reflections.

Speaker 1 I mean, I have to say that he's spiky, he's controversial, he's foul mouse sometimes, but you always feel that he honestly believes that he's providing the lowest possible cost travel to the most number of people.

Speaker 1 Now, some people will say, as we've just discussed, that might not be optimal in all circumstances. But I met him a few times.
It's kind of hard not to be slightly charmed by his abrasive attitude.

Speaker 6 In many ways, he kind of reminds me of Simon Cowell, the infamously mean X-Factor judge. You know, it's playing a persona.
People love to hate on Ryanair. They love to hate on Simon Cowell.

Speaker 6 They They love to hate on Michael O'Leary. It's all part of the brand.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, is he good, bad, or just another billionaire? We'd like to know what you think.
Please email goodbadbillionaire. That's all one word.

Speaker 1 Goodbadbillionaire at bbc.com or drop us a text or WhatsApp to 001-917-686-1176.

Speaker 6 Tell us what you think. That's goodbadbillionaire at bbc.com or 001-917-686-1176.
And don't forget to include your name as we may read out your message on a future episode.

Speaker 6 We've had some feedback in from some of our listeners. This message came from Geronima, originally from Barcelona, but currently living in New York.
She says, first let me say I love your podcast.

Speaker 6 Thanks, Geronima. I love the Dead Billionaire miniseries.
I think Hetty Green was another billionaire, neither good nor bad, a product of her childhood and the times.

Speaker 6 And if she'd been a man, she would have been another Rockefeller or Vanderbilt. I think that is a good guess.
Yeah, I think she would have. I cannot wait for the next episode.

Speaker 6 Thanks for that, Geronimo. So who do we have on the next episode?

Speaker 1 We have a man of steel, quite literally. Lakshmi Mittal, the head of one of the world's biggest steel companies, was the biggest steel company for many years and helped reshape an entire industry.

Speaker 6 Yeah, at his peak in 2008, he was worth $45 billion and he was the richest man in Europe.

Speaker 1 Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast produced by Tamzin Curry. The researcher is Maria Noyan.

Speaker 6 The editor editor is Paul Smith and it's a BBC Studios audio production. For the BBC World Service, the commissioning editor is John Minnell.

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