After tracking Elon Musk’s private jet on the Twitter platform, a Florida college student is now facing legal threats from Elon Musk. He even labeled the new CEO of the company as a “hypocrite”.
The Independent was informed by the 20-year-old Jack Sweeney that he thought the billionaire was joking when he threatened to file a case against a “crazy stalker” who attacked Elon’s car, carrying one of his nine children to Los Angeles on Wednesday.
Several accounts operated by Sweeney were immediately banned after Elon stated that legal action was being initiated “against Sweeney & organizations that supported harm to my family.”
After the tweet was posted, Mr. Sweeney told The Independent that he hadn’t heard from Mr. Musk again and didn’t anticipate doing so.
After reaching home on Thursday the freshman from the University of Central Florida said “I’m doing fine.” “He’s just saying that on Twitter, there’s nothing official and there probably won’t be.”
Using publicly available data, Mr. Sweeney created the @Elonjet flight-tracking Twitter account in June 2020, which is when he first attracted the wrath of the second-richest man on the planet.
Last year Musk had privately messaged Sweeney to close the account for $5000 but he refused to do so.
When the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX ended his $44 billion buyout of Twitter in October, he promised to permit @Elonjet to continue using the service.
“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Mr. Musk tweeted on 6 November.
But in a rough few days, Mr. Musk has banned, unbanned, and then again banned the @Elonjet account, which had more than 500,000 followers.
“Any account doxxes real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation,” Mr. Musk tweeted on Wednesday night. “This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.”
The last tweet from the @Elonjet account was published 24 hours before the claimed stalker incident in Los Angeles on Wednesday night, according to Mr. Sweeney.
He said it seemed Mr. Musk was forming up Twitter’s terms of service on the go to suit his objectives.
“Everything he does is just out of nowhere and whatever he wants,” Mr. Sweeney said.
The @elonjet account was allegedly “shadow-banned” by the platform’s content moderators over the weekend, according to a leak Mr. Sweeney claimed to have received from a source inside Twitter.
He shared a screenshot where Ella Erwin, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, is seen telling the team members to “apply heavy VF (visibility filtering) to @elonjet Immediately” on his personal Twitter account.
Despite the clear threat of legal action, Mr. Sweeney declared that he has no intention to hire a lawyer.
