SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during a conversation with legendary game designer Todd Howard (not pictured) at the E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles, California, June 13, 2019.
Mike Blake | Reuters
Twitter has suspended the account dedicated to tracking the location of billionaire Elon Musk’s private jet.
The account, @ElonJet, was run by Florida college student Jack Sweeney and had amassed more than half a million followers. It tracked Musk’s plane’s location using publicly available flight data and appears to have been suspended Wednesday morning.
“Well it appears @ElonJet is suspended,” Sweeney tweeted Wednesday. He encouraged users to follow him on other platforms.
Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October, and he has been vocal about his efforts to protect free speech on the site. In early November, Musk claimed he was such a staunch advocate for free speech that he would not ban the plane tracking account, which he called a “direct personal safety risk.”
Internally, however, Twitter employees may have received different instructions. Sweeney shared a thread of tweets on Dec. 10 claiming his account had been shadow banned, which means the reach of the account is intentionally limited.
He said an employee sent him a screenshot of the company’s vice president of Twitter’s Trust and Safety council asking to place heavy visibility filtering on @ElonJet. The Trust and Safety council was disbanded Monday.
But on Dec. 12, Sweeney said in a tweet that it appeared as though the @ElonJet account was no longer hidden or banned “in any way.”
Sweeney also runs accounts dedicated to tracking the private flights of other public figures like Bill Gates, former President Donald Trump and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Sweeney’s Instagram account dedicated to tracking Musk still appears to be active.
Sweeney and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
