The Twitter bot tracking Elon Musk’s private jet reappears on Threads

Jack Sweeney, the college student and creator of the banned @ElonJet Twitter account that tracked the movements of Elon Musk’s personal jet, has now launched the tracking project on Meta’s rival platform, Threads. “ElonJet has come to Threads!”[ads1]; Sweeney posted on the new @elonmusksjet account on Thursday. As of Monday, July 10, the Threads account currently has 80,000 followers.

Sweeney addressed his second post on the @elonmusksjet Threads account directly to Mark Zuckerberg, asking the Meta founder if he can remain on the platform. Sweeney includes a shoutout in the Threads bio of @elonmusksjet to the @zuckerbergjet account dedicated to tracking the location of Zuckerberg’s private jet. That account hasn’t posted any live information yet, but Sweeney has been actively tracking the movements of Zuckerberg’s jet across Meta’s Facebook and Instagram services for some time.

The account tracking Musk’s jets already appears to have been suspended and then reinstated on both Threads and Instagram (where it has been active for months) in recent days.

Elon Musk suspended the @ElonJet Twitter account last December, claiming the tracker was a “direct personal security risk.” Before this suspension, Musk said he would not ban the account as part of his “commitment to free speech.” Sweeney also runs several other trackers on Instagram, Facebook and Bluesky that monitor the flight paths of private jets for notables such as Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos and Kim Kardashian. These automated “bot” accounts created by Sweeney pull together publicly available air travel data to map the locations of the aircraft. The Twitter accounts associated with these trackers were as well suspended.

Before his @ElonJet Twitter account was suspended, Sweeney once rejected Musk’s offer of $5,000 to remove the tracker, asking the billionaire to increase his offer to $50,000 and give him an internship. By calling out Zuckerberg, Sweeney appears to be motivating the Meta boss to take similar actions.

Shortly after Sweeney’s @ElonJet Twitter account was suspended last year, Musk tweeted, “Any account that provides real-time location information about anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical security breach. This includes posting links to websites with real-time location information.” Twitter’s guidelines for private information and media were also updated in December to specify that the sharing of publicly available location information is only allowed after “a reasonable amount of time has passed” — which allowed Sweeney to create a new Twitter account to track Musk’s jet with a 24-hour delay.