- The college student who tracks Elon Musk's jet said he "seems really bothered" by his account.
- Jack Sweeney's comments followed Musk's BBC interview in which he discussed banning @ElonJet.
The college student who runs a Twitter account tracking Elon Musk's private jet said the Tesla CEO "seems really bothered" by the account following comments the billionaire made in his BBC News interview this week.
Musk spoke with BBC correspondent James Clayton on Tuesday about everything from his $44 billion takeover of Twitter and issues about the company including mass layoffs and banning the @ElonJet account in December.
Musk was asked "What about @ElonJet?", to which he responded: "What about it?"
Clayton said the decision to ban Sweeney's account was "quite controversial" and asked whether Musk was "flexing his muscle overly."
Musk said: "No, it's just real-time doxxing is not allowed."
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, doxxing is finding or publishing private information about someone online.
Sweeney's account used bots to scrape and post publicly available flight data that people would otherwise be able to find via ADS-B Exchange.
When Clayton said that Sweeney was using publicly available information, Musk said: "No, actually it's not true. He was using non-public information combined with public information." However, the Twitter owner did not say what non-public information Sweeney had used.
Sweeney told Insider on Thursday: "His obvious annoyance with ElonJet just adds to the significance of ElonJet. He just doesn't want it to be that visible."
Sweeney also said it was "probably" true that he "lived rent-free" in the billionaire's head.
In early 2022 Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop sharing the flight information. Sweeney said he would stop for $50,000, but that Musk never followed up on his offer.
After the @ElonJet account was banned, Sweeney began tweeting flight data with a 24-hour delay at @ElonJetNextDay to adhere to Twitter's updated private information policy that restricted users from sharing individuals' live locations.
—ElonJet but Delayed (@ElonJetNextDay) April 12, 2023
Twitter also suspended more than 30 other accounts that used public flight data to track the movements of private jets used by prominent individuals such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Insider contacted Musk and Twitter for comment. The company responded with an automated message that didn't address the inquiry.