Musk Blocks Twitter Account Tracking His Personal Private Jet Route

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeong Hyunjin] Elon Musk, CEO of the social networking service (SNS) Twitter, has blocked the account of an American college student who tracked and posted the flight path of his private jet, CNBC and other media reported on the 14th (local time).

According to reports, Jack Swinney, a 20-year-old college student in Florida, posted on another SNS account that the Twitter account 'ElonJet(@ElonJet)' he had been operating appeared to have been blocked that day. When visiting the actual account, a message stating "This account has been suspended by Twitter for violating Twitter rules" is displayed.

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

Swinney used a bot he developed to track the takeoff and landing times, locations, and travel durations of CEO Musk's private jet and posted the information on this account. The account had over 500,000 followers.

In January, Swinney revealed that he had received multiple direct messages (DMs) from CEO Musk asking him to take down the posts, and during this process, he was offered $5,000. However, Swinney demanded $50,000 citing college tuition and other reasons, and Musk rejected the offer, so the account remained active.

Foreign media reported that Musk said the reason for requesting the account to be discontinued was because he "does not want to be shot by a lunatic."

On the same day, Swinney announced that another account tracking the planes used by employees of Musk's other company, SpaceX, was also blocked. Subsequently, Swinney's personal account was suspended as well. About 30 other accounts operated by Swinney that tracked private jets of celebrities such as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, and former U.S. President Donald Trump were also blocked.

After the account suspension, Swinney told U.S. media Business Insider in an interview that he would continue to disclose flight information through other SNS platforms such as Instagram and Discord, rather than Twitter.

Neither Musk nor Twitter issued any official statements regarding this. However, Musk responded to a tweet from another user who positively evaluated the account suspension by saying, "Posting someone else's location in real-time violates policies related to doxxing, but posting locations after the fact is okay."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.