According to Insider: The college student who tracked Elon Musk’s private jet says the Twitter CEO seems ‘really upset’ with his account.
Jack Sweeney’s comments followed Musk’s BBC interview in which he discussed banning @ElonJet.
The college student who ran the Twitter account tracking Elon Musk’s private jet said the Tesla CEO seems “really upset” with the account following comments made by the billionaire in his BBC News interview this week.
Elon Musk spoke with BBC correspondent James Clayton on Tuesday about Twitter’s $44 billion acquisition and the company’s issues, including mass layoffs and the banning of the @ElonJet account in December.
Elon Musk was asked “@what about the Elonjet?”, to which he replied: “What about this one?”
Clayton said the decision to ban Sweeney’s account was “quite controversial” and asked whether Musk was “flexing his muscles excessively.”
Elon Musk said: “No, it just doesn’t allow real-time doxing.”
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, doxing is the act of finding or publishing personal information about someone online.
Sweeney’s account used bots to scour and post publicly available flight data that people would otherwise be able to find through the ADS-B exchange.
When Clayton said that Sweeney was using publicly available information, Musk said: “No, actually that’s not true. He was using non-public information with public information.” However, the Twitter owner did not specify what non-public information Sweeney used.
Sweeney told Insider on Thursday: “His apparent annoyance with Alonjet is exaggerating Alonjet’s importance. He doesn’t want it to be visible.”
Sweeney also said that it was “probably” true that he lived “rent-free” in the billionaire’s head.
In early 2022, Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop sharing flight information. Sweeney said he would stop for $50,000, but Musk never followed through on his offer.
After the @ElonJet account was banned, Sweeney began tweeting 24-hour delayed flight data at @ElonJetNextDay to comply with Twitter’s updated personal information policy, which prohibited users from sharing live locations of individuals. Gave. does.
Twitter also suspended more than 30 other accounts that used public flight data to track the movements of private jets used by prominent figures such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
SpaceX Kings contacted Musk and Twitter for comment. The company responded with an automated message that did not address the inquiry.
”Elon Musk “just doesn’t want it to be that visible,” said Jack Sweeney.”