Twitter bans account tracking Elon Musk's private jet

Twitter on Wednesday has banned @Elonjet, the infamous Twitter account that had been tracking the billionaire's private jet. 

Twitter account @ElonJet, run by Jack Sweeney, is dedicated to tracking Elon Musk's private jet. The jet in question is a Gulfstream G650ER. At the start of the year, Musk reached out to Sweeney requesting the account be taken down as it posed a security risk to him as anyone in the world could now know his flight history and most recent flight paths.

Musk had, earlier this year, offered to buy it for $5,000. Sweeney, however, attempted to negotiate a better deal, which Musk declined. 

Sweeney, a first-year student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, said he uses publicly available transponder data from Musk’s private plane to track its location.

“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 wrote last month. 

Musk is not the only billionaire that Sweeney has been tracking. Sweeney operated more than 30 plane-tracking accounts that share publicly available data. Many of the accounts track billionaires and high-profile business personalities, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. 

Twitter users were infuriated with the micro-blogging platform's decisions. 

"It's an absolute farce that an account solely meant to distribute *publicly available* information about flights of one of the most powerful people in the world got banned after exposing how their account was previously shadowbanned," wrote a Twitter user.

ALSO READ: Over 100 Twitter employees cut off from Slack after they fail to respond to Elon Musk’s email on a Saturday