How Elon Musk's Own Blunder Led To Ban On Twitter Account Tracking His Private Jet

The ban on the Twitter handle ElonJet which tracked Elon Musk‘s private jet is reportedly a result of the billionaire’s own mistake.

What Happened: Though Musk enrolled the jet into a federal privacy program, he failed to implement the measures, reported Vice, citing documents obtained by Motherboard.

The privacy program, called the Federal Aviation Administration's Privacy ICAO Aircraft Address (PIA) program, allows owners to set up a temporary aircraft address known to the owner and the government and not the public.

This enables the government to track the jet while also preventing flight trackers from accessing it, thereby addressing privacy concerns.

Though Musk’s Space venture SpaceX enrolled Musk into the program sometime before August 2022, it did not verify the dummy number or activate it, says the report. The lack of activation enabled flight trackers to continue tracking Musk’s jet with the help of his original jet number.

Why It Matters: Musk suspended the twitter handle ElonJet and that of its creator Jack Sweeney in December. The billionaire CEO had recently finished the acquisition of Twitter.

Musk claimed that the account was a security risk and changed Twitter policy to no longer allow “doxxing real-time location” of anyone on the platform.

Along with tracking Musk's jet, Sweeney tracked private jets of Microsoft Corp MSFT co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon.com Inc AMZN founder Jeff Bezos, Meta Platforms co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Cuban.

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Photo courtesy: Thomas Hawk on Flickr