The Twitter bot that tracks Elon Musk’s private jet makes a reappearance 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 arrived at Threads!” Sweeney submitted to the new @elonmusksjet account 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 Thread’s bio by @elonmusksjet to @zuckerbergjet account dedicated to tracking the location of Zuckerberg’s private jet. That account has yet to publish any live information, but Sweeney has been actively tracking the movements of Zuckerberg’s jet across the Metas Facebook and Instagram services for some time.

The account tracking Musk’s jets already appears to have been suspended and subsequently reinstated on both threads and Instagram (where it has been active for several months) for the past few days.

Elon Musk suspended the @ElonJet Twitter account last December, claiming the tracker was a “direct personal security risk.” Prior to 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, monitoring the flight paths of private jets for notables such as Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezosand Kim Kardashian. These automated “bot” accounts created by Sweeney collect publicly available flight data to map aircraft locations. 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 and requested that the billionaire increase the offer to $50,000 and give him an internship. By calling out Zuckerberg, Sweeney appears to be urging the Meta CEO to take similar action.

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 violation. This includes posting links to websites with real-time location information.” Twitter’s private information and media policy was 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 on a 24-hour delay.