By Reuters | Updated: 10 July 2023
Jack Sweeney, the creator of an account tracking Elon Musk’s private jet in real time, has moved to Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter-rival Threads after being suspended from Twitter last year.
“ElonJet has arrived to Threads!” read Sweeney’s first post on Thursday from the account handle @elonmusksjet, which had over 21,000 followers as of Saturday morning.
ElonJet has tracked the movements of Musk’s private jet using data available in the public domain.
Post by @elonmusksjet
View on Threads
In December Twitter, owned by Musk, suspended the ElonJet account, with the billionaire threatening legal action against the account’s operator after saying his son had been mistakenly followed by a “crazy stalker”.
Musk had said in a tweet in November that his commitment to free speech “extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk”.
Sweeney, a 20-year-old University of Central Florida student, had tweeted in December that Ella Irwin, Twitter’s Vice President of trust and safety, requested the account be filtered and less visible to users.
In media interviews, Sweeney has said that he turned down a $5,000 (roughly Rs. 4 lakh) offer from the Tesla chief executive officer in 2021 to shut down his bot account.
Meta-owned Threads, posing a direct challenge to Twitter, garnered millions of users in hours, including prominent figures such as Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez and Democratic US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as it seeks to take advantage of its rival’s weakened state after a series of chaotic decisions from Musk.
Sweeney, Twitter and Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
