The reappearance of the Elon Musk jet tracker on Threads immediately provokes Mark Zuckerberg. After having his @ElonJet Twitter account suspended for tracking Elon Musk’s private jet, college student Jack Sweeney has moved the tracking effort to Meta’s competitor, Threads. To wit: “ElonJet has touched down in Threads!” Sweeney tweeted on Thursday using the brand new @elonmusksjet account. The Threads account has amassed 80,000 followers as of Monday, July 10th.
In his second thread under the @elonmusksjet handle, Sweeney asked Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for permission to stay on the site. Sweeney mentions the @zuckerbergjet account, which follows the movements of Zuckerberg’s private jet, in the Threads bio of @elonmusksjet. Sweeney has been keeping tabs on Zuckerberg’s private jet via Meta’s Facebook and Instagram services for quite some time, but that account has yet to provide any real-time updates.
Read more: Traders are getting ready for US payrolls because global yields are at a 15-year high.
In the last few days, the account that has been following Musk’s plane appears to have been suspended and then reinstated on both Threads and Instagram (where it has been active for months).
In December of last year, Elon Musk claimed that the tracker on the @ElonJet Twitter account posed a “direct personal safety risk.” Musk had previously stated that he would not ban the account as part of his “commitment to free speech.” Sweeney maintains multiple more trackers on Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky that follow the routes taken by the private planes of famous people, including Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, and Kim Kardashian. Sweeney’s “bot” accounts, which are entirely automated, compile publicly accessible flight data to plot the whereabouts of the planes. These trackers’ related Twitter accounts were likewise disabled.
Before Musk terminated Sweeney’s @ElonJet Twitter account, Sweeney had rejected a $5,000 offer to remove the tracker and asked for a $50,000 offer and an internship instead. Sweeney appears to be trying to encourage the Meta CEO to follow Zuckerberg’s lead by publicly shaming him.
Musk tweeted shortly after @ElonJet, Sweeney’s Twitter account, was suspended last year, “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation.” This involves sharing hyperlocal content, such as links to location-aware websites. By making it clear that users can only share their public locations after a “reasonable time has elapsed,” Twitter’s privacy and media policy was changed in December, allowing Sweeney to register a new account and monitor Musk’s flight with a 24-hour lag.
Meta’s Threads platform, which was recently released, has already garnered 100 million users, making it the most major Twitter challenger to date. Even though the app has been submitted for regulatory approval under EU data protection legislation, it is not currently available in the EU. Sweeney’s plan to bring back his live Elon Jet Tracker on Threads has the potential to further inflame tensions between the two social media behemoths. Already, Twitter has vowed to sue Meta, saying that Threads was developed using Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property, and a cage battle between Musk and Zuckerberg appears to be a serious possibility.
