The Fight Over Tracking Elon Musk, Taylor Swift and Other Private Jets
A few years ago, social media accounts tracking celebrities’ private jets dominated the internet. The most prominent was @ElonJet, which tracked Elon Musk’s air travel and amassed more than half a million followers in 2022. The account’s creator, then 19-year-old Jack Sweeney, became embroiled in a public feud with Musk after rejecting a cash offer from the Tesla CEO to delete the account. Sweeney was eventually banned from Twitter after Musk acquired the platform in October 2022. He also tracked the private jets of Taylor Swift, Mark Zuckerberg and other high-profile figures.
Since then, platforms have intensified their efforts to restrict jet-tracking accounts. Twitter, now known as X, prohibited the sharing of live location information in late 2022. Meta followed in 2024, banning several jet-tracking accounts from Threads and Instagram.
The case for public scrutiny
There is a clear public-interest argument for monitoring private jet use. It provides a window into high-profile people’s carbon footprint, particularly when their public image is built around environmental activism. In 2016, Leonardo DiCaprio was criticized for flying 8,000 miles by private jet to accept a “green award.”
After Meta’s ban, Sweeney told NBC News in October 2024 that the practice had “journalistic value” because it could reveal aspects of a CEO’s work, potential business partnerships and the environmental impact of private air travel.
But the practice remains contentious. Musk has called jet tracking a “physical safety violation” and threatened legal action against Sweeney, although no lawsuit materialized. In 2024, Taylor Swift’s lawyers accused Sweeney of “stalking and harassing behavior,” according to TIME. (Sweeney rejected that characterization, telling the magazine that aircraft owners should reasonably expect their jets to be tracked because the information is publicly available.) To avoid the hassle completely, Bernard Arnault, chairman of luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH, sold his company’s private jet and opted for chartering.
Efforts to restrict access
The pushback has extended beyond social media companies and personal legal threats. The National Business Aviation Association, which represents the interests of private aviation operators, has lobbied the Federal Aviation Administration to remove personally identifiable information from the FAA Aircraft Registry.
In 2024, Congress also passed an amendment to the FAA reauthorization bill that would allow private aircraft owners to anonymize their registration information.
The FAA’s Privacy ICAO Address program offers another layer of protection. Under the program, eligible U.S.-registered aircraft operating in U.S. airspace can request a temporary alternative ICAO address, making real-time tracking more difficult. The measure does not make aircraft invisible, however, because the planes continue to transmit Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data.
How jet tracking still works
ADS-B data is broadcast by aircraft to share information such as GPS position, altitude and ground speed. That data can be collected by receivers or accessed through online platforms such as ADS-B Exchange. Websites, including Celebplanes, use publicly available flight data to provide information about the positions of celebrity aircraft. Even when social media platforms restrict the sharing of live locations, the underlying data can remain accessible elsewhere.
Sweeney continues to track aircraft through an account on Bluesky. After @ElonJet was banned, he returned to X in 2022 with @ElonJetNextDay, which posts information about Musk’s jets with a 24-hour delay. The delay allows the account to comply with X’s private information policy, which prohibits sharing real-time physical locations but permits publishing historical location data. Sweeney also operates an independent tracking site, TheAirTraffic.
