Taylor Swift Threatens to Sue Student Tracking Her Private Jet, but He's Not Backing Down

Jack Sweeney, the student who first made headlines in 2022 when Elon Musk reached out to him to ask him to stop tracking and posting information about his private jet, is back in the news. Truth be told, he never left, spinning that initial jet-tracking account into a series of similar accounts, tracking the private jets of everyone who's anyone, from Kylie Jenner to Vladimir Putin and other sanctioned Russian oligarchs.

Sweeney has also been tracking Taylor Swift's private jet, a 2009 Dassault Falcon 7X jet, compiling her publicly available data and posting it on social media. For the first time, this shone a negative light on Swift, as her flights revealed her huge carbon footprint, earning her the completely unenviable nickname of "the real climate criminal."

Well, Swift has had enough – of the tracking, but presumably of criticism from climate activists, too. So she had her team pen a strong-worded letter to Sweeney, arguing that what he's doing amounts to nothing short of harassment and endangerment. Swift has a history with stalkers, and having private details about her life on social media, such as her exact location in real-time, is not helping with that.

"While this may be a game to you, or an avenue that you hope will earn you wealth or fame, it is a life-or-death matter for our Client," the letter reads. Swift is living in a "constant state of fear for her personal safety" because of Sweeney's "reckless actions," so he's invited to desist from them, remove all published data so far, and shut down the offending accounts.

The implication is obvious: do this, or get sued. But Sweeney isn't scared, telling one media outlet that he's doing nothing wrong, and least of all illegal. He's just taking publicly available information, puts it together and presents it to the public in the interest of "transparency." He surely wishes no harm on any one of the celebrities he's tracking, including Swift, who, he believes, has a few "good" songs.

Elon Musk would disagree, though. As Sweeney's first big "target," he too threatened to take him to court over his refusal to stop publishing his location in real-time, and he's siding with Swift in the dispute. The Tesla CEO took to Twitter to say that the pop star has every reason to be worried because Sweeney is "an awful human being."

When Musk first learned that the student was tracking his private jet, he reached out to find out how he was doing it. It turned out that Sweeney used data from ADS-B transponders on planes, skirting the FAA's privacy programs that rendered flight paths private to the public.

ADS-B data was public, but people didn't know where to look for it, he said. He did, so he created bots that would parse it and then post it online, showing the exact flight paths of the aircraft in real-time.

Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to shut down the page but refused to up the offer to $50,000 or a Tesla, and all negotiations fell through after. He eventually threatened to sue, but Sweeney is telling the media he never did.

Maybe he's hoping Swift is also all huff and no puff because he says he has no plan to shut down the page tracking her jet.

Sweeney is an awful human being.

Taylor Swift is right to be concerned.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2024