Grab your reading glasses and head for the comfiest seat in the house, there's a new book on Elon Musk coming out. It tries to offer an objective, well-documented view into Musk's controversial acquisition of Twitter (now X) but, as is to be expected, also reveals personal information in the process.
An example in this sense would be how much Elon Musk used his private jet throughout 2022, zapping between California and Texas to handle business, flying to Greece for a short vacation, or traveling internationally for discussions with world leaders.
We already knew that Musk's jet, a 2015 Gulfstream G650, made over 135 flights in total in 2022, totaling 351 hours in the air and emitting 146 times more carbon dioxide than the average American. Musk himself was onboard most of the time when his plane took off, Bloomberg journalist Kurt Wagner says in the book Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter’s Soul.
The worst part of it all, for Musk at least, was that every one of his moves by plane was duly and immediately documented on social media. A 20-year-old student, Jack Sweeney, had designed bots that compiled publicly available flight data and was posting all flight information online in real time. Musk's attempts to first get him to stop and then to ban him had been unsuccessful at the time.
Photo: YouTube / Ted
Musk had reached out to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to have Sweeney's account banned and began buying shares in Twitter when his request was refused. He had good reason to want the tracking to stop, and they went beyond his initial fears over his personal safety, according to Wagner.
Flight data was making him visible at all times. Even Twitter employees began monitoring the tracking account when he took over the company, eager to know when he'd be in the office – and quite possibly dreading the moment he'd arrive because of announced layoffs. His ex, singer Grimes, was only able to serve him with custody papers after she instructed a process server to monitor the tracking account.
By comparison, being shamed for his private jet carbon footprint was a trifle.
Musk didn't use his private jet just as transportation, though. On extended flights, he'd bring people with him, from investors to journalists, and they'd do business in the air. Sweeney's tracking never revealed the identity of the passengers on a certain aircraft, but the mere fact that he was posting takeoff and arrival times in real time was reason enough for concern.
On X, Sweeney is saying that even some of Tesla's higher-ups followed his original account, but he doesn't offer a possible explanation for their reasons for doing so.
The excerpts published from the book on the topic highlight Musk's hypocrisy in taking over Twitter in the name of free speech and then banning accounts that he personally didn't like for whatever reason. While what Sweeney did – and continues to do – is not ethical, it is not illegal, either. He's just taking data that already exists in a database, parses it, and compiles it for posting. Perhaps to spite Musk, Sweeney says he's doing it in the name of free speech.
“Twitter employees started following [@ElonJet] so they’d know whether the new boss was in the office”. This is true even Senior members at SpaceX and Tesla had followed the account for a long time. Even some of the following Andrej Karpathy, Drew Baglino, and Lars Blackmore.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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