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The Elon Musk jet tracker is living rent-free inside the Twitter owner’s head
Elon Musk said he cared so much about ‘free speech’ that he’d never delete Jack Sweeney’s flight-tracking accounts. Then he did. And then he didn’t. Then he did again.
“I should get refunded,” Jack Sweeney says when we talk on Wednesday afternoon, just hours after his Twitter account—for which he’d paid $8 to be a Twitter Blue member—was suspended. “Actually, I should get like $16 back I think, because I paid twice.”
After all, Sweeney didn’t have just a personal account. He’s better known to Twitter users as the operator of the Musk private-jet-tracking account (@elonjet). But in one fell swoop Sweeney’s personal account, plus the one he uses to track Musk’s plane, plus the accounts he uses to monitor 24 other celebrities’ travels were “permanently banned.” That is, until some were reinstated less than 12 hours later, and, by the time of this publication, banned again—because on Musk’s Twitter, nothing “permanent” actually is.
Sweeney was expecting to wake up on December 14 well rested, recovering from a trip to Dallas where he watched the NBA’s Mavericks in action. Instead, he woke up to a barrage of texts, Telegram messages, and phone calls—almost all telling him to check Twitter.
After seeing that his personal account and @elonjet were gone, he realized that the bots he had programmed to feed data to his jet trackers were crashing, as they could no longer tweet under the deleted handles. The Twittersphere was quick to react. After all, Musk had specifically stated when he took over the platform that he would not delete Sweeney’s accounts because of his belief in “free speech.” Many users were up in arms over the new CEO’s apparent hypocrisy.
— Nate Anderson (@ClarityToast) December 14, 2022
Until Wednesday, Twitter’s doxxing policy read as one would expect: It banned the sharing of personal information, such as phone numbers and personal addresses, unless that information was already public. The word doxxing, it should be noted, originated online to describe the publicizing of private “documents”—and as long as the term has existed, this is the type of behavior it’s been used to describe.
But on Wednesday afternoon, a surprisingly specific provision was added to Twitter’s doxxing policy. Now the platform prohibits “live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes . . . regardless if this information is publicly available.”
This policy change occurred after Twitter banned Sweeney’s @elonjet account, as well as his personal account.
According to Sweeney, Musk created the new rule “just to get rid of me.”
Fast Company has reached out to Musk for comment and will update if he responds.
Sweeney built flight-tracking bots for a number of notable figures, from Donald Trump to Musk, starting in 2020. The project originated as a way to keep the then-high schooler occupied during quarantine, but by 2021 it had amassed tens of thousands of followers. The bots would tweet out when these celebrities’ planes departed or landed at different airports using publicly available information from the ADS-B Exchange.
The effort also earned Sweeney a DM from Musk (who he once called his role model), offering the teenager $5,000 to take the bot accounts down. Sweeney told him to add a zero, making it $50,000, to give him an internship, and maybe throw in a Tesla Model 3. Then, Sweeney said, they could talk.
Musk didn’t take the bait.
Though the two haven’t interacted since early 2021, @elonjet has clearly weighed heavily on Musk’s mind. After acquiring Twitter, Musk tweeted that Sweeney’s account was a personal “safety” risk but he wouldn’t remove it.
Despite Musk’s attestation, Sweeney tweeted that his accounts were being shadowbanned, a term used to describe how social media platforms can limit the reach of an account’s tweets. Screenshots of Twitter’s Slack channel obtained by Sweeney, which Fast Company was unable to verify, showed Twitter Trust and Safety VP Morgan Irwin asking her subordinates to implement “heavy” visibility filtering on the account. (Anyone who stuck around for Part 2 of the so-called Twitter Files about shadowbanning accounts, or the dissolution of the Trust and Safety team just this week, will appreciate the irony here.)
Early in the day, Sweeney’s other jet-tracking accounts, several of which had gone viral over the past year, appeared unaffected. He had begun tracking celebs like Kylie Jenner and Taylor Swift, for example, setting off a firestorm about the carbon emissions created by their short-distance trips. Mark Cuban had also personally DM’d Sweeney, asking for the Twitter account tracking his private jet to be removed from the platform. Sweeney convinced Cuban to give him two tickets to the December 12 Dallas Mavericks basketball game, but he didn’t remove the account.
Of course, nobody holds sway like Musk in the social media fiefdom he now owns. Despite repeatedly asserting his content moderation rules would be more “fair” than the platform’s before his ownership, Musk did not give Sweeney a heads up that his account would suddenly be in violation of the company’s new policies on Wednesday. Though Musk clarified in a tweet that “Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok,” Sweeney was never alerted to this distinction.
But Sweeney, striking an upbeat tone, tells me that Musk doesn’t know what’s coming to him. While his tracking accounts were being deleted but his personal account remained active, Sweeney tweeted out the link to a Mastodon. The account gained 3,000 followers in the short window before he lost access to the bird app—and continues to grow. Truth Social accounts for Musk’s jet and Trump’s jet, which preexisted the bans, are also growing rapidly.
Sweeney says that the turmoil has only encouraged him to continue working on a website, where he plans to track celebrity jets live, complete with estimates of their carbon emissions and historical data. Ideally, he says, the website will also show a world map with photos of each celebrity’s face moving locations to represent where their planes are in real time. Sharing that information—without censorship from Musk—is Sweeney’s goal.
“What if my website becomes more popular, and shows all their faces, live, where they are?” Sweeney teased. “Oh, it could be a lot worse.”
