On May 17, the Florida governor’s nine-seat private Cessna flew round-trip from Tallahassee to Tampa, where Gov. Ron DeSantis held a bill-signing news conference at a Christian school.
Two days later, the plane’s flight path surfaced on Twitter on a new tracking account dubbed @DeSantisJet, run by a Clermont college student named Jack Sweeney.
If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Sweeney, 20, is the same University of Central Florida student who last year started a controversial account tracking the private jet of Tesla and Twitter owner Elon Musk. That account, @ElonJet, drew the ire of Musk himself, who suspended the account (and those of journalists who covered it), threatened legal action against Sweeney and prompted Musk to announce bans for any account “doxxing real-time location info of anyone.”
Both the Musk and DeSantis accounts are based on flight data compiled by tracking enthusiasts and available to the general public, as are accounts Sweeney created to track jets owned by Russian oligarchs. He’s also tracked flights from the likes of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Taylor Swift and Drake.
