Stars in the Sky: Tracking Luminaries’ Bizjets

Jack Sweeney was excited to receive a direct message from Elon Musk that read, “Can you take this down? It’s a security risk.” This was in response to Sweeney’s posts on Twitter about Musk’s travels on his Gulfstream G650ER jet.

Musk is one of many private jet users whose flight activity Sweeney has posted. They include Mark Zuckerberg, Taylor Swift, Jeff Bezos, Drake, Ron DeSantis, and even Russian oligarchs. At one point before he was suspended for doxing real-time locations of people, he had over 500,000 followers on Twitter. 

Sweeney’s father, a technical operations controller for American Airlines, taught him how to track jets when he was just nine. “I was able to tell my mother that Dad was almost home when he had to commute from Dallas,” he recalls. In his high school years, Sweeney installed a receiver on his parents’ roof near Orlando where he could track the paths of every airplane within 100 miles. During the pandemic shutdowns, he had the time to program a Twitter account to automatically post the movements of certain private jets. 

A Worldwide Community of Flight Trackers

Many backyard flight trackers download their data to the website ADS-B Exchange. This forms a worldwide network that displays a real-time map of all in-transit flights. Law enforcement and even the Department of Defense have contacted the site for information when their government-owned systems had gaps in their data. But flight trackers everywhere were dismayed when ADS-B Exchange was sold to Jetnet last January. CEO Derek Swaim said Exchange users should not expect much change, but Sweeney has already been contacted by the site, which requested a $50-a-month membership fee. So, he started his own website and encourages other trackers to download their data there.   

Sweeney has no plans to discontinue tracking private jets and posting the travels of those who use them. He is not concerned about their safety since “the data is already out there; I’m just compiling it.” 

Musk offered $5,000 for Sweeney to take down his flight information, but Sweeney countered with $50,000, which Musk refused to pay. Sweeney later accepted Dallas Mavericks basketball tickets from team owner Mark Cuban but says, “I still post Cuban’s jet locations on the social app Discord.” 

Today, Twitter requires a 24-hour waiting period before any flight tracking can be posted, which appears to be a form of compromise. However, Sweeney had to change the names of all the Twitter handles such as @ElonJet, and now has to start over building up his number of followers. 

“We can probably work around any attempts to disguise or prevent our jet tracking unless new technology is developed to completely encrypt the data,” Sweeney believes. “That would cost billions and would have to be done worldwide.”  

After being featured on CNN and Bloomberg TV, Sweeney was invited to speak last June at Media City Bergen’s Future Week 23 conference in Norway. He will graduate from the University of Central Florida in a couple of years and would like to continue doing something entrepreneurial or get a job that would combine his interests in computer technology and aviation. But for now, he just enjoys communicating with the rich and famous, and all the notoriety this brings. 

Suzanne Driscoll has written about business topics for the Boston Globe, Entrepreneur.com, Shoe Retailing Today, Family Business, MyBankTracker.com, and Oppenheimer Funds. She lives with her family in St. Petersburg, Florida.