More than a week after being banned from using Twitter, Jack Sweeney, a sophomore at the University of Central Florida who has been with Elon Musk for at least a year, has a new account on the platform. Call @ElonJetNexDayThe hourly account tracked Elon Musk’s private jet but was delayed by 24 hours.
It remains to be seen whether it will be the final chapter in an ongoing story, but you have to give it to Sweeney; he is persistent.
Two years ago, the 20-year-old created a Twitter account that used public data to automatically map the flights of Musk’s private jet, @ElonJet. Musk asked Sweeney again in January via a direct message on the platform to take it down in exchange for $5,000. “It’s a security risk,” Musk reportedly wrote to Sweeney. “I don’t like the idea of being shot by a madman.” Instead, when Sweeney half-jokingly asked about a Model 3 or $50,000, Musk clearly fooled Sweeney, but he clearly didn’t forget him.
Instead, Sweeney wrote a headline story on a very busy day last week after Musk, now the owner of Twitter, ban account, costing Sweeney 530,000 followers. The impetus, Musk suggested on Twitter, was that a car carrying his son X Æ A-12 was “followed by [a] crazy stalker” in Los Angeles.” While there was no apparent connection between the account and the incident, Twitter shortly thereafter informed Sweeney that “after careful review,” it “determined that your account violated the Twitter rules” without saying which rules were violated at the time.
After that, Twitter continued to close more accounts, including Sweeney’s personal account (for violating Twitter’s rules on “platform manipulation and spam”); other accounts run by Sweeney tracked the air travel of other prominent individuals, including Musk arch enemy Mark Zuckerberg; and a day later, multiple journalists covered Sweeney’s story, including the New York Times’ Ryan Mac and the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell. (`Some are lefteliminate.)
Separately, Musk increased his focus on Sweeney, tweeting: “Legal action is being taken against Sweeney and support organizations harming my family.”
Sweeney continues to run his social media accounts elsewhere. Last week, he opened an account on the newer social media platform Mastadon which tracks Musk’s private jet in real time and has amassed 67,000 followers; Sweeney also has pages on Facebook and Instagram that track the arrivals and departures of private jets, including Musk’s, and has a sizable following.
And now he’s back at it on Twitter too, at least for now. Under its new rules, “sharing publicly available location information after a reasonable amount of time has passed so that the individual is no longer at risk of physical harm” is not a violation. offense. With a 24-hour delay in reporting where Musk’s private jet had gone, @ElonJetNexDay seems to be within the limits of Twitter’s recently established safety parameters.
However, it’s easy to explain the account as Sweeney criticized Musk, who has used his power as Twitter’s new owner erratically almost since the day he pulled a tub. washed into the company’s San Francisco headquarters in late October to joke about its takeover. (“Let that sink in.”)
Even Musk’s devoted followers on the platform are tired of all the movies. When Musk asked them in a survey on Sunday whether he should step down as head of the social networking site, the vast majority of respondents answered that he should. Since then, Musk has said that he will step down as CEO after finding “someone” stupid enough to take the job!”
