Jack Sweeney and Getty
- The college student who tracked Elon Musk’s private jet is back on Twitter under a new username.
- Jack Sweeney, 20, had his first account @ElonJet banned following Musk’s new rules.
- He’s now back under @ElonJetNextDay – the account operates the same way but with a 24-hour delay.
The college student who tracked Elon Musk’s private jet is now back on Twitter under a new username after the billionaire banned his first account @ElonJet for breaking Twitter rules.
Jack Sweeney, 20, said he started tracking Elon Musk’s private jet in 2020 because he was a fan. Over two years later, the billionaire threatened to sue him after suspending his Twitter accounts.
Using the new username @ElonJetNextDay, Sweeney will continue to track Musk’s private jet but with a 24-hour delay, Insider has learned. The move follows the billionaire changing the rules of Twitter, where he’s become the new CEO since acquiring the platform on October 27.
—ElonJet but Delayed (@ElonJetNextDay) December 22, 2022
In an interview with Insider on Thursday, Sweeney said he will be “posting manually” for now as “the framework for automating isn’t there yet.” He added it is hard to say when the account will be fully automated.
He added that “@ElonJet is still available elsewhere” such as on former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social. He will also be bringing other accounts such as @Celebjets to platforms like Instagram and Facebook, Sweeney told Insider.
Sweeney had over 30 accounts tracking politicians and billionaires including Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, and Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos.
But Musk, who had earlier this year offered to pay Sweeney to take the old account down, took issues with it after public information about the whereabouts of both him and other public figures was shared online, including after he said a “crazy stalker” followed a car that had his two-year-old son inside.
Twitter posted around the same time what it said was a new policy to ban the posting of someone’s live location in most cases. It said the update was “to prohibit sharing someone else’s live location in most cases,” saying that it would remove tweets and suspend accounts dedicated to sharing people’s live locations.
According to its new rules, “sharing publicly available location information after a reasonable time has elapsed, so that the individual is no longer at risk for physical harm” is not a violation.
“Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation,” Musk tweeted on December 15. “This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.”
He added: “Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.”
Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment by Insider.
