Delta CEO Ed Bastian said he doesn’t have a public feud with the world’s richest man.
“There’s no tit-for-tat, as far as I’m concerned,” he said during a Friday interview with CNBC when asked about Elon Musk’s recent X offensive against the airline. “I’m a big fan of Starlink. I’m a fan of what Elon does. I drive a Tesla. OK? So there’s nothing. All this nonsense about being personal is not true at all.”
The apparently one-sided battle appears to have started in March, when the airline chose Amazon’s Leo as its next-generation satellite internet provider over SpaceX’s Starlink. At the time, Musk made one post, warning the airline “doesn’t realize how much this will affect them.”
Musk has stepped up his criticisms of Bastian and Delta in the past two weeks after aviation-industry X account, JonNYC, posted unconfirmed quotes from Bastian, including a comment warning that, “We do not want to be with Elon Musk. Trust me.”
The same day, Musk reposted an article with the unverified comments, saying that Bastian would “lose his job over this.”
Musk has posted several other times about Delta since the unconfirmed comment, making fun of the airline’s internet choice: “Best way to sandbox an AI is to put it on a Delta flight,” he wrote in late September.
Bastian is not the first airline CEO to draw Musk’s ire. In January, Musk and Michael O’Leary, the CEO of the European budget airline Ryanair, exchanged jabs on X because the company didn’t install Starlink on its planes over what it said were cost issues.
At the time, Musk polled X users, asking if he should buy RyanAir and find someone named Ryan to take over as the main boss. O’Leary, who has fashioned himself as an outspoken chief executive, launched a “great idiots” seat sale in response.
Delta’s Bastian is taking a very different tack.
“I don’t pay any attention,” he said when asked about the feud on CNBC. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.”
Delta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
