Meta resumes tracking Elon Musk’s private jet on Instagram and Threads
This week, Meta’s Threads app became incredibly popular, registering more than 70 million accounts in about 40 hours after its launch. One of the users was a familiar account that became a thorn in the side of Twitter owner Elon Musk, as it shared what Musk called “coordinates for his assassination.” According to Engadget, this is the ElonJet account.
Nevertheless, Meta has temporarily blocked this account – @elonmusksjet – on both Instagram and Threads. According to its owner, Jack Sweeney, it could have been a mistake. Indeed, Meta’s representative later confirmed that the blocking was a mistake.
Sweeney has previously used Twitter to publish data on the movement of Musk’s plane, which has repeatedly caused Musk’s displeasure. After purchasing Twitter, Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to delete the account, but the offer was rejected.
At the end of the year, after Musk acquired Twitter, the company permanently blocked ElonJet’s account. It has been replaced by a new account that publishes data on the plane’s movement with a 24-hour delay, in line with Twitter’s updated policy.
Data on the movement of Musk’s plane is also published on other platforms, including Facebook, Telegram, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Among Reddit users, there are also those who are tracking the plane.
ElonJet continues to operate on the Threads platform, which is a direct competitor to Twitter. For this reason, Twitter even accuses Meta of using former employees and trade secrets to create the Threads app.
It’s also worth noting that Musk’s plane can be tracked by anyone without bloggers on social media. To do this, just go to the popular website flightradar24.com, which tracks the movement of all civilian aircraft in the world equipped with special trackers. To track an aircraft, it is enough to know its registration ID, and this information is publicly available. Therefore, Musk’s attacks on the pretext that bloggers are allegedly “leaking” his coordinates and Musk may suffer because of them are not true, as anyone who is more or less “friendly” with a computer and interested in aviation can get this open data.
