Twitter suspends account that monitored Elon Musk’s jet; owner’s account is banned too

Twitter suspended an account run by a college student that tracked the whereabouts of Elon Musk’s private jet, despite the chief executive of the social media platform previously saying he wouldn’t suspend the account.

The saga took another turn Wednesday afternoon when the company also suspended the personal Twitter account of the student, according to the user’s profile.

The owner of the @ElonJet account, Jack Sweeney, a student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, tweeted Wednesday morning from his personal account, “well it appears @ElonJet is suspended.” ElonJet was the account that monitored the movements of Musk’s jet. Sweeney also shared a screenshot of a note that said the ban was permanent.

A message on @ElonJet’s Twitter profile said it violated Twitter rules but offered no further explanation.

The account was closed down despite Musk’s comments in a tweet last month that he would not interfere with its status because of his stance against censorship.

“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk said in the Nov. 6 tweet. A note below the tweet offered readers context that the ElonJet account “is currently banned,” and that it tracked the jet using publicly available data.

Twitter went beyond closing the @Elonjet account Wednesday afternoon by suspending Sweeney’s personal account, @JxckSweeney. A similar note said it violated Twitter’s rules.

Neither Twitter nor Sweeney immediately responded to requests for comment.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Wednesday, Sweeney said it was unclear why the account was banned and that he was caught by surprise because of Musk’s previous comments embracing free speech. Sweeney called it “bad publicity for Musk,” and said people “are going to say [Musk is] a hypocrite.”

“It just shows they can play the rules how they want,” Sweeney told the Journal.

On Sunday, Sweeney tweeted on his personal account that an anonymous Twitter employee informed him that Twitter was limiting his account’s visibility. But by Monday Sweeney tweeted that the restrictions appeared to have been lifted.

Sweeney told the New York Times last February that he created an algorithm and a bot using publicly available data from Musk’s plane’s transponders, which includes the aircraft’s altitude, latitude and longitude, and that he had been tracking Musk’s jet since June 2020.

Sweeney also told the newspaper that Musk sent him a private message in November 2021 asking him to deactivate the account for security reasons, even offering him $5,000 to do so. Sweeney said he countered the offer, including upping the price to $50,000 or a Tesla, then later asked for an internship instead. The conversation eventually went dark on Jan. 23, he said.

Sweeney, who has also used public data to track the movements of musician Drake, entrepreneur Mark Cuban, Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, tweeted Wednesday morning that he would continue keeping tabs on Musk’s travels on other platforms, including Instagram, Facebook and Mastodon.