The eagle has landed--and the blue bird ain't gonna like it.
When we last left Jack Sweeney, the college student who created @ELonJet, the Twitter account that tracked the real-time airplane usage of Elon Musk, the microblogging site's owner, he was looking for bluer skies.
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The world's richest man has never had any love for the account. He once offered Sweeney $5,000 to halt his jet-tracking, but the University of Central Florida student declined.
"Any chance to up that to $50k?" Sweeney replied early last year. "It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car, maybe even a Model 3.”
But then Twitter, home of the blue bird mascot, Larry, clipped the account's wings, suspending @ElonJet on Dec. 14. The move came after the Tesla (TSLA) -) CEO described an incident in Los Angeles where someone had followed a car with one of his children -- named X -- on board, apparently believing that billionaire was in the vehicle.
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"Last night, car carrying lil X in LA was followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood," Musk tweeted. "Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family."
Sweeney Opens Shop on Threads
Sweeney’s suspension led Twitter to refresh its policy on sharing “someone’s private information online,” in what it described as a breach of privacy and of the platform’s rules, according to the Huffington Post.
The policy stated that “sharing private information can pose serious safety and security risks for those affected and can lead to physical, emotional, and financial hardship.”
But now Sweeney has set up shop in a new digital place, and it's not just any old social-media account.
Oh, no, he landed his mighty Musk tracker on Threads, Meta Platforms' (META) -) real-time app that aims to take on Twitter.
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"ElonJet has arrived to Threads!" Sweeney posted on Threads.
The Threads launch has amped up the rivalry between Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which already has the two billionaires looking to duke it out in the Colosseum.
Twitter sent a cease and desist letter to the so-called Twitter Killer, alleging "systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets."
Sweeney took to his personal Threads account to weigh in the legal threat, posting an image of a New York Magazine headline that read "Twitter threatens to sue Meta over rival threads app."
'Another Empty Threat': Sweeney
"Reme(m)ber when Elon said he would sue me," he wrote. "Just another empty threat."
Threads commenters were not particularly sympathetic to Musk’s complaints.
"Nothing like a whiny billionaire, who says free speech for everyone, but amazingly doesn’t like it when it causes him irritation," one person said.
"Following just to boost numbers and piss Musk off even more," another post read.
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"This is the only reason I'm on threads," another person said.
Another person put up an image of a New York Post headline proclaiming "Suspended Twitter account that tracked Elon Musk's jet moves to Threads."
"UR famous. lol," the post read.
Last year, Sweeney created a Twitter account to track aircraft belong to Russian oligarchs, saying that he set up the account "mostly because people asked me to go track them" following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Sweeney, who has shared publicly available information, had over 30 accounts on Twitter that tracked flights of the wealthy and powerful, including such names as former President Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian and Zuckerberg.
