- The student who tracks Elon Musk’s private jet is now doing the same for Ron DeSantis’s plane.
- Jack Sweeney created a new Twitter account that he said will track the governor’s state-owned jet.
- The @DeSantisJet account will tweet with a 24-hour delay to comply with Twitter’s privacy rules.
The college student who tracks Elon Musk’s private jet on Twitter has decided to give Florida governor Ron DeSantis the same treatment.
Jack Sweeney, a student at the University of Central Florida, has set up a new Twitter account, @DeSantisJet, to track the government-owned jet the politician uses.
He told Insider he set up the account because of the rising interest in DeSantis, who, next week, is expected to declare his intention to run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
On May 11 the governor signed a bill into law that will redact details about trips he makes on both state planes and private, chartered flights, including names of staff and family members traveling with him.
However, it will still be possible to monitor the movements of the state-owned jet using publicly available data from ADS-B Exchange, a flight-tracking platform. ADS-B technology allows satellites to track aircrafts and helps avoid collisions.
The account says it tracks a 10-seat Textron jet with the tail number N943FL that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement owns and issued its first tweet Friday night.
—Ron DeSantis’s jet (Tracking) (@DeSantisJet) May 19, 2023
Sweeney made headlines when Musk offered him $5,000 to take down the Twitter account that tracked his private jet. Sweeney refused, so after Musk took control of Twitter, he suspended the @ElonJet account.
Musk said in a BBC News interview earlier this year that Sweeney had been “using non-public information combined with public information to track his movements,” which “arguably constituted doxing.” However, Musk did not say what non-public information he believed Sweeney had used.
The student got around the ban by creating a new account called @ElonJetNextDay, which posts flight-tracking data with a 24-hour delay to comply with Twitter’s updated privacy policy that restricts users from sharing others’ live locations.
The DeSantis account will also use a 24-hour delay when tweeting the plane’s movements.
DeSantis has been a prominent figure in the news over the past few months, largely due to his ongoing feud with Disney. The Florida governor has targeted the company’s special self-governing powers in the state while Disney has accused him of trying to “weaponize government power.”
On Thursday, Disney made a U-turn on its decision to build a nearly $1 billion corporate campus in Florida, The Wall Street Journal reported.
DeSantis’s office did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.
