Private jet-tracking sleuth won't back down despite threats from Musk, Swift: 'I'm going to share'

By the time Jack Sweeney graduated from college, his hobby of tracking celebrity private jets had already drawn legal threats from Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.

The 23-year-old, whose dad served as an airline maintenance operations controller at American Airlines, has always been fascinated with aviation. It was when Sweeney was bored during the COVID-19 pandemic in Florida that he decided to build an X account solely around Musk's flights. 

"I was interested in where [he was] going," Sweeney told The Cool Down. "It's sharing public info — and if these [celebrities] are going to [fly private], you can't get mad at people for knowing it's happening. I'm going to share it." 

Sweeney used publicly available flight-tracking information obtained through the Federal Aviation Administration and registration databases like ADS-B Exchange to tweet out every time Musk's private jet flew somewhere. 

What started as something to kill time between virtual classes elevated into something much bigger. Sweeney's accounts now rack up hundreds of thousands of followers across multiple social platforms, especially on Reddit.

He eventually built a tracking website, TheAirTraffic.com, which tracks the status of numerous private jets registered to celebrities and politicians. His work sparked an online subculture dedicated to amateur aviation trackers who use the same free databases as Sweeney, as well as radio scanners, to track celebrity planes. 

"If I could do [all private jet owners], I would," he said. "It's why I want more of a platform." 

Sweeney's account dedicated to Musk's flight was suspended from X in 2022 after Musk said he took legal action against Sweeney, accusing him of putting Musk's family at risk, per the BBC. In 2024, the legal team behind pop singer Swift accused Sweeney's jet tracking account of being "stalking and harassing behavior," the Washington Post reported.

Sweeney denies both accusations and emphasizes that he gets all his information from public and free online data. Musk's X and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta have since banned all flight tracking from their platforms because of "the risk of physical harm to individuals," per Wired and NBC.

"They have 18 lawyers, and anybody can send letters; it doesn't mean they're going to follow through," Sweeney told The Cool Down. "It's just a threat." 

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'These people can fly 15 minutes [instead of] having to take an Uber'

Private aviation is a growing problem that has escalated over the last few years. 

A 2025 study by the International Council on Clean Transportation estimated that private jets produced 19.5 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 alone.

"Private jets are a surprisingly large source of air and climate pollution," Daniel Sitompul, Aviation Fellow at the ICCT, said in a statement. "A typical private jet emits as many greenhouse gases each year as 177 passenger cars or nine heavy-duty highway trucks."

That 19.5 million tons is also a 25% increase from the past decade. This is more greenhouse gas than all flights, including commercial ones, departing London's Heathrow Airport in 2023, the ICCT reported.

Sweeney told The Cool Down that some followers had asked him to clarify how much of an environmental impact the flights were making, which is why he added that information for every post. 

"When you see those numbers — you don't really think about it until they're there," he said about the environmental impact. 

Some people may need private jets for security purposes, Sweeney pointed out. But for a lot of the owners who are celebrities or have "gotten rich off of something like crypto," Sweeney told The Cool Down, he does not understand why they need to travel this way. 

"These people can fly 15 minutes [instead of] having to take an Uber," he said. 

Jet-trackers are now battling chartered flights

Regardless of the backlash from some figures like Musk and Swift, Sweeney is very intent on tracking these flights. "[I want to] make this information easier and more accessible," he said. 

But in addition to certain social platforms banning his tracking, some rich figures and businesses are now chartering private jets rather than owning them, in hopes of escaping public tracking, Business Insider reported. Swift reportedly hired VistaJet, a private jet charter company, in 2024 to fly to the Super Bowl, per the Associated Press. A VistaJet spokesperson told BI they would not name their clients because they use VistaJet "for the safety, security, and privacy." 

In addition to protecting client names, these chartered jet companies also do not publicly disclose emissions data, the BBC reported in 2024. Some, like VistaJet, do publish sustainability reports outlining annual carbon footprint, but it is not standard across all these private companies. 

"You can't track those planes," Sweeney said. "It just hides it more and more." 

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