A Florida college student facing legal threats from Elon Musk for tracking his private jet on Twitter has labelled the tech billionaire a “hypocrite”.
Jack Sweeney, 20, told The Independent that he thought Mr Musk was bluffing when he threatened to sue after a “crazy stalker” allegedly attacked a car carrying one of the Twitter CEO’s nine children in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
Mr Musk tweeted that legal action was being taken “against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family”, and promptly banned several Twitter accounts operated by him.
Mr Sweeney told The Independent he hadn’t heard any more from Mr Musk since the tweet was posted, and didn’t expect to.
“I’m doing fine,” the University of Central Florida freshman said when reached at home on Thursday. “He’s just saying that on Twitter, there’s nothing official and there probably won’t be.”
Mr Sweeney first earned the ire of the world’s second wealthiest man after setting up the @Elonjet flight-tracking Twitter account in June 2020 using publicly available data.
He said Mr Musk sent him a private message last year offering him $5,000 to close the account, which he refused.
When the Tesla and SpaceX boss completed his $44bn takeover of Twitter in October, he pledged to allow @Elonjet to remain on the platform.
“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Mr Musk tweeted on 6 November.
But in a tumultuous few days, the @Elonjet account which had more than 500,000 followers has been banned, unbanned and then banned again by Mr Musk.
“Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation,” Mr Musk tweeted on Wednesday night. “This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.”
Mr Sweeney said that the last post from the @Elonjet account was made 24 hours before Wednesday night’s alleged stalker incident in Los Angeles.
He said it appeared Mr Musk was making up Twitter’s terms of service on the go to suit his own purposes.
“Everything he does is just out of nowhere and whatever he wants,” Mr Sweeney said.
Over the weekend, Mr Sweeney claimed to have received a leak from a source inside Twitter showing that the @elonjet account had been deliberately suppressed — or “shadow banned” — by the platform’s content moderators.
He posted a screenshot to his personal Twitter account apparently showing Ella Erwin, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, asking team members to “apply heavy VF (visibility filtering) to @elonjet immediately.”
The Independent has not been able to verify the authenticity of the screenshot.
Mr Musk has claimed to have exposed how Twitter’s content moderators targeted conservatives for “shadow banning” prior to his takeover in the release of a cache of internal records which he called the “Twitter Files”.
Mr Sweeney said it appeared that Mr Musk was in favour of shadow banning accounts that he didn’t like, further illustrating his hypocrisy.
Mr Sweeney also said he had been a longtime fan of the Tesla CEO, but -- like many others -- had grown tired of his polarising behaviour since purchasing Twitter.
“I still think Tesla and SpaceX are cool things that he does but he’s really spiralled the whole Twitter thing out of control. It’s just one Twitter thing after another.”
The freshman told The Independent that many of Twitter’s decisions since the takeover had backfired on them, such as introducing Twitter Blue checkmarks and allowing Kanye West back on the platform.
“I think he needs to be a little bit more careful,” he said.
Mr Sweeney’s personal Twitter account has now been suspended, along with several others he set up to track private jets belonging to Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and several Russian oligarchs.
Despite the threat of legal action apparently hanging over him, Mr Sweeney said he has no plans to lawyer-up.
“For right now we’re just seeing as we go, there’s not a reason to yet. It’s just a tweet,” he added.
The Independent did not immediately hear back after attempting to reach Twitter and Mr Musk for comment.
