Elon Musk now has one more reason to dislike Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter rival, Threads. Jack Sweeney, a college student who created a bot account to track Musk’s private jet using publicly available flight details, has now joined Threads, adding to Musk’s discontent.
Sweeney began monitoring Musk’s flight movements in 2020, but his bot account, ElonJet, gained popularity last year when it started posting real-time updates on Musk’s private jet. However, Twitter suspended the account twice, once at Musk’s request, after the platform deemed Sweeney’s account violated new rules against doxxing real-time information, which resulted in its suspension despite garnering nearly 500,000 followers. Eventually, all of Sweeney’s accounts were suspended from Twitter by the end of 2022.
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Around the same time, Twitter updated its rules regarding private information, requiring users to share “publicly available location information after a reasonable time has elapsed, so that the individual is no longer at risk for physical harm.”
Sweeney’s rivalry with Musk goes long back before Musk’s tenure as Twitter CEO. Reportedly, Musk in the past had offered Sweeney $5,000 to delete the account, but the offer was declined.
Sweeney announced his arrival on Threads with a post published on Thursday, stating, “ElonJet has arrived on Threads!” As of now, the account has a total of 79,000 followers and shares Musk’s flight information with a 24-hour delay.
Threads is a new social media platform owned by Instagram that allows users to post text, photos, and videos to a select audience. It functions in a similar manner to Twitter, making it one of its biggest and closest rivals. Musk recently threatened Meta, accusing the platform of poaching former employees and utilising the company’s trade secrets to develop the Threads app.
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