Elon Musk May Have Given Up On Privacy For His Jet Travels, But Taylor Swift Hasn’t

25.10.2023 - 10:37 / forbes.com / Jeff Bezos / Travis Kelce

When he bought Twitter in October 2022, Elon Musk’s to-do list included giving Jack Sweeney the boot.

Sweeney, a college student from Orlando, Florida, had been tracking Musk’s $65 million Gulfstream G650 and tweeting the whereabouts of the richest man on Earth. Musk wasn’t amused. He saw his privacy as a security issue. “I don’t love the idea of being shot by a nutcase,” he told Sweeney in a direct message.

Musk took his quest for privacy one step further. He enrolled in a free Federal Aviation Administration program called PIA that allows private-jet owners to hide their location by having their planes transmit alternative identity codes.

It didn’t work. Sweeney is still publishing the movements of Musk’s G650 in real time — he’s just switched to Instagram, BlueSky and Facebook. It was easy to crack the FAA’s privacy code, Sweeney told Forbes. “You can do it in a day.” Eventually, Musk and his crew quit trying, Sweeney said, and now Musk flies unmasked. Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The FAA’s PIA program has cloaked the travels of 48 private jets this year, according to JetSpy, a subscription flight-tracking service. The Chicago-based company has been able to figure out the owners of 38 of those planes and shared those findings exclusively with Forbes. They’re a mix of the bold-faced names of celebrity gossip and billionaire masters of the tech and financial universes, with some surprising exceptions.

Despite the jet owners’ enrollments in PIA, it’s still possible to see how frequently Taylor Swift has visited her tall American boyfriend, Travis Kelce, in Kansas City; where Magic Johnson is chasing the next deal in his Gulfstream III; how many times Kenneth Griffin has visited France, or where Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin and Evan Spiegel — or at least their planes — have taken off and landed.

The public can also follow jets owned by Walmart and employee-owned WinCo Foods as they zig-zag the country, and we’re privy to the otherwise hush-hush athlete-recruiting efforts of the University of Kansas, which has been taking flak for years from faculty over the expense of its Cessna Citation CJ4.

Plane watchers follow the aircraft by tracking transponder signals that planes have been required to transmit since 2020. The transponders flash out location, altitude, speed and a unique ID code assigned by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

The system is called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B. When it was first sketched out in the 1990s, its designers didn’t anticipate that plane-spotting enthusiasts would use inexpensive receivers to capture the signals and collaborate online to create coverage maps that track planes around the world.

Hence the FAA’s privacy