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10th July 2023
10:47am BST
The Twitter account famous for tracking Elon Musk's private jet at all times has shifted to Threads.
College student Jack Sweeney caught the attention of Musk last year when the billionaire offered him thousands of dollars to stop running @ElonJet, an account which tracked Musk's private jet.
Eventually, the Twitter owner banned Sweeney's account from the platform, but he's now relaunched his Musk-tracking operation on Threads, Mark Zuckerberg's new rival to Twitter.
“ElonJet has arrived to Threads,” the new account named “Elon Musk’s Jet” run by the University of Central Florida student posted last week.
Sweeney started tracking Musk's jet in 2020, using publicly available information and data to tell followers of @ElonJet where Musk’s private jet was taking off from and landing at any given time.
By the time the account was suspended from Twitter, it had over 500,000 followers.
Musk argued that the account presented a security risk to him and was a "physical safety violation” after his son was "followed by a crazy stalker."
He threatened legal action against Sweeney.
But Sweeney refuted claims that his Elonjet account could have caused this, writing in an op-ed for Newsweek: “I don’t think my Elonjet account could have led a ‘crazy stalker’ to his car.”
“I’m tracking his plane, not the car, so I don’t see how it could be connected,” he added.
Regarding the threat of legal action from Musk, Sweeney said he feels “slightly” intimidated, but said there “doesn’t seem to be any legal ground for a lawsuit.”
“I’m just posting information that’s already out there,” Sweeney wrote.
Since arriving on Threads, the account has already amassed 79.6k followers at the time of writing.
In one of his first posts on the platform, Sweeney wrote on his own personal account: “Remember when Elon said he would sue me. Just another empty threat,”
This was in response to reports that Musk was going to sue Zuckerberg over Threads for being a 'copycat' of Twitter.
Speaking to Insider, Sweeney said he hopes "Twitter dies."
He told the publication: “I’m honestly hoping Twitter dies... As I am hindered on there, you search for my name, seems I’m search banned."
Whilst for now he is having to manually post updates to ElonMusksJet, he hopes Meta will soon allow him to return to auto-posting.
Along with tracking Musk's whereabouts, Sweeney had also set up accounts on Twitter tracking other billionaires, such as Bill Gates and Floyd Mayweather, before moving onto the jets of Russian oligarchs such as Roman Abramovich.
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