The college student who tracks Elon Musk's private jet on Twitter is now doing the same with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' (R) plane.
Jack Sweeney, a student at the University of Central Florida, set up a Twitter account, @DeSantisJet, which tracks the movements of DeSantis' government-owned jet. The Florida governor's use of the jet to fly around the country has generated criticism after the state Senate passed a bill to keep details of his trips redacted. Politico reported the bill will apply to both current and past trips taken by the governor, as well as other top Florida officials.
However, Sweeney is still able to track the plane using publicly available data from an FAA-sanctioned satellite platform called ADS-B.
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DeSantis is expected to officially announce his bid for president in the coming week, and Sweeney told Insider that he set up the account due to rising national interest in the governor. His @DeSantisJet account issued its first tweet on Friday night, documenting the jet's path from Tallahassee to Tampa and back.
Sweeney made international headlines when he created an account, @ElonJet, which tracked the movements of the business mogul's private jet in real-time. At the beginning of 2022, Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to delete his account, but the student refused. After Musk purchased Twitter, he banned @ElonJet and threatened to sue Sweeney.
Since Twitter's privacy policy only prevented users from sharing someone's location in real-time, Sweeney created a new account, @ElonJetNextDay, that tracks Musk's plane on a 24-hour delay. This account is still maintained, and Sweeney's DeSantis-tracking account follows the same 24-hour delay rule.
In an interview earlier this year with BBC News, Musk complained that Sweeney was using "non-public information combined with public information to track his movements," though he did not elaborate on what kind of non-public information he believed Sweeney had used.
