Ok, Maybe Elon Was Right To Ban The Twitter Account That Tracks His Jet (BONUS: Real Life Whodunnit)
CNBC - Twitter has suspended the account dedicated to tracking the location of billionaire Elon Musk’s private jet.
The account, @ElonJet, was run by Florida college student Jack Sweeney and had amassed more than half a million followers. It tracked Musk’s plane’s location using publicly available flight data and appears to have been suspended Wednesday morning.
Yesterday news dropped that Twitter had banned the @ElonJet account. In case you don't own a bottle of Boring Company Burnt Hair perfume (in which case, I feel bad for you), the Twitter account does exactly what the name implies: it tracks Elon's private jet movements. And before you go all "whAt A DisGUSTing InVASIon OF PriVACy" keep in mind that the info is public.
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The UCF student who runs the account was in the news earlier this year after beefing with the richest dude on Earth. Elon had asked him to shut down the account "for safety reasons" and offered him $5,000 for his troubles. So Jake did what any college student would do in that situation… asked for $50,000 or a Tesla.
Elon proceeded to tell Jake to "fuck off."
Then, yesterday, seemingly out of the blue, @ElonJet got Jon Taffered (read: "shut it down"). Not long afterwards, Jake's personal account was also suspended. Stuff started getting weird when links to outside sources related to Jack and his trackers started getting… dare I say… shadow-banned.
And the internet was all sorts of butthurt. Some Twitter users pointed to Elon being a fucking hypocrite for banning a troll after vowing to protect freedom of speech on the platform. Meanwhile, another camp was dying on the "Elon has rights and doesn't deserve to have his personal privacy violated" hill.
Well, turns out Elon might've had a point. Later in the day Elon tweeted that his son, X Æ A-12, was put in harm's way…
(Well, don't I feel like an asshole for saying having your flights get tracked comes with the territory of being among the most powerful people on earth).
Elon went on to outline some new doxxing rules on Twitter.
But wait, it gets weirder (because Elon is involved so of course it does)…
Lon Corleone has launched a nationwide manhunt for this creep who was stalking him/little X (no, this doesn't break Elon's doxxing rules because it isn't in real time).
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Side note: imagine how many crimes would be solved if grainy ass CCTV footage was half as good as this?
Let's be honest, this guy doesn't stand a chance. It seems like the internet is this close to solving the murders in Idaho. So with video evidence this clear reaching tens of millions of people, this should be an open and shut case.
Every day at 5 PM Large and I hop on to discuss the day's biggest finance and markets stories in 15-minutes or less (think: Barstool Rundown but make it finance). Yesterday we discussed Twitter banning the Elon jet tracker account, a $100M social media pump and dump scheme, and the Fed's rate hike. Watch or listen now on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple.