Jack Sweeney revives @ElonJet as @ElonJetNextDay, tracking Elon Musk's jet with a 24-hour delay, after Twitter banned sharing other peoples' real-time location
with a 24-hour delay Ginger Adams Otis / Wall Street Journal : Elon Musk's Jet Has a Twitter Account Tracking It Again—With a 24-Hour Delay Ariel Zilber / New York Post : Jet-tracking kid brings back Elon Musk flight-monitoring handle —with a catch See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The revival is a direct response to the crackdown earlier that week: Twitter first suspended the original @ElonJet bot days after its creator accused the company of shadowbanning it (the suspension of @ElonJet), then swept away roughly thirty jet-tracking accounts at once (the mass suspension of ~30 trackers) and rewrote its private information policy to ban accounts 'dedicated to sharing someone else's live location' (the policy rewrite).
@ElonJetNextDay is Sweeney's compliance workaround rather than a retreat: by holding flights back 24 hours he keeps the tracker alive on the platform while staying outside the new real-time-location rule. The episode matters because the rule was written and enforced on Musk's own platform, against a bot that tracked Musk himself.
First-order effects
- Sweeney regains distribution on Twitter for Musk-jet content, but only in delayed form — the real-time product that made @ElonJet popular is gone under the new policy.
- Musk gets what he asked for: his jet's position no longer appears live on Twitter, though the underlying flight data remains public and now resurfaces a day late.
Second-order effects
- Other operators of the suspended jet-tracking bots face the same fork — accept a 24-hour delay to stay up or lose the platform entirely — making delay-compliance the template for surviving location-tracking bans.
- Twitter must now draw an enforcement line between 'live' and 'delayed' location sharing, a distinction its new policy does not clearly define, inviting repeated takedown-and-revival cycles.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, celebrity-movement tracking migrates from real-time platform bots to delayed feeds and off-platform channels, and enforcement follows the person — as seen when Meta later suspended Sweeney's Instagram and Threads trackers citing physical-harm risk (Meta's suspension of Sweeney's accounts).
- Platform owners are establishing that publicly available flight data can still be restricted at the distribution layer, setting a precedent other platforms and regulators will reference when weighing privacy against open-data tracking.
The trend: Platforms are asserting discretionary control over public-data-derived tracking of individuals, forcing trackers into delay workarounds and pushing the fight over location privacy from data availability to distribution.