@elonmusksjet has landed.
The Twitter account formerly known as @ElonJet has launched on Threads, The Verge reported on Monday morning. Run by the college student Jack Sweeney, the social-media account tracks the whereabouts of Elon Musk’s private plane. Sweeney started the account on Meta’s new platform four days ago, and it already has 91,000 followers as of this writing.
Musk and Sweeney have had a bit of a volatile relationship, with the Twitter CEO initially offering Sweeney $5,000 to remove the account. Sweeney countered by asking for $50,000 and an internship, which Musk turned down. In December, Musk fully suspended the account, saying it was a “direct personal safety risk.” Sweeney’s other accounts tracking the jets of people like Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, and Kim Kardashian were also taken down.
Before launching on Threads, which itself went live only a few days ago, Sweeney was tracking Musk’s jet via Instagram, which is also owned by Meta. According to The Verge, both accounts seem to have been suspended and then restored in the past few days. So far, @elonmusksjet has shown that Musk’s plane has taken only a handful of flights: from Austin, Texas, to Brownsville, Texas, and then to Los Angeles.
For those who haven’t been following the social-media wars, Threads is Mark Zuckerberg’s answer to Twitter’s decline, thanks in part to Musk buying the platform in October. Threads gained 100 million users in the days following its release, and Musk and Zuckerberg have recently been talking about engaging in a cage fight. Twitter is also threatening to sue Meta over Threads, saying the company used trade secrets and Twitter’s IP to create its new product.
For now, Threads seems to be hospitable to Sweeney’s attempts to track the movements of the world’s elite. But in the Twitter bio for @elonmusksjet, he promotes the new account @zuckerbergjet, and he asked Zuckerberg directly via the Musk account whether he’d be able to remain on the platform. The @zuckerbergjet page has yet to post anything and has only 2,800 followers. If it takes off in the same way, though, it may become ejected from the new social-media site.