College student Jack Sweeney, known for creating the banned @ElonJet Twitter account that tracked Elon Musk’s personal jet, has now brought his tracking project to Meta’s rival platform, Threads.
On Thursday, Sweeney announced the arrival of ElonJet on Threads through the new @elonmusksjet account. At the time of this writing, the Threads account has received over 106,000 followers since its launch on Monday, July 10th.
Sweeney’s second post on the @elonmusksjet Threads account was directly addressed to Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In the post, Sweeney asked if he was going to be allowed to remain on the platform and even gave a shoutout in the Threads bio to the @zuckerbergjet account, which tracks the location of Zuckerberg’s private jet.
Although the @zuckerbergjet account has not shared any live information yet, Sweeney has been actively monitoring Zuckerberg’s jet across Meta’s Facebook and Instagram services for some time.
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Elon Musk had suspended the @ElonJet Twitter account in December last year, citing concerns about personal safety. Prior to the suspension, Musk had initially stated that he wouldn’t ban the account as he was committed to free speech.
Sweeney also operates several other trackers on Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky, monitoring the flight paths of private jets belonging to notable individuals such as Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, and Kim Kardashian. However, the associated Twitter accounts for these trackers were also suspended.
Sweeney’s rejection of Musk’s $5,000 offer to remove the tracker, along with his request for a $50,000 offer and an internship, received attention early last year. It was also around this time that Musk began amassing Twitter shares, until he had a 9.2% stake and became the social media platform’s largest shareholder.
Following the suspension of Sweeney’s @ElonJet Twitter account last year, Musk tweeted about suspending accounts sharing real-time location information, as it violated personal safety. In December, Twitter updated its private information and media policy, allowing sharing of publicly available location information only after a reasonable time had passed. This change enabled Sweeney to create a new Twitter account with a 24-hour delay to track Musk’s jet.
A recent report also found that SpaceX entered Musk’s private jet into a federal privacy program but failed to follow through with the necessary privacy measures, and thus left it publicly ‘trackable.’
Musk has yet to comment on this recent development, but he continues to appear to be threatened by Threads, and Zuckerberg. In the five days since its release, Threads has already amassed over 100 million users, making it the first conversations platform to actually pose a threat to Twitter.
The Twitter owner, in a reply to its new CEO Linda Yaccarino, tried to match Threads’ record figure with a prediction of hitting a record of cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime.
Information for this story was found via Twitter, Threads, and the sources and companies mentioned. The author has no securities or affiliations related to the organizations discussed. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
