After a Florida college kid got on Elon Musk’s wrong side by posting the travel coordinates of Musk’s private jet, the FAA just caved to the billionaire class and will allow private jets to keep their flight data secret.
We had for years been enjoying a few laughs about the Florida college kid who was tracking the movements of Elon Musk’s private jet on social media, right up until Musk went and bought Twitter and then shut the kid’s account down. (Flight and aircraft information is public, and we’ve used it in our reporting before.) Before long, the youngster Jack Sweeney started tracking Taylor Swift and other celebrities’ private jets, also highlighting issue of how much carbon emissions the celebs were singlehandedly creating with their jet-set lifestyles.
Well, score a win for the jet set. The Chronicle reports that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) just approved allowing private jets to keep their flight data secret, which sure feels like another thank-you sop to Musk from the Trump administration.
The FAA handed down the decision this past Friday, March 28. In the Chronicle’s words, the new legislation “enables private aircraft owners to submit an electronic request to withhold registration numbers and other personal information from public view.” Jet and other aircraft owners can also apply for a new identifiable aircraft ID code if they feel they have some greater security need.
The aviation agency may even take this a step further and make private jet information private by default. That proposal is still in the “public feedback” phase, and the agency is assessing whether this heightened privacy would create safety or maintenance issues.
Ironically, the Biden administration paved the way for this with the “FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024,” which among other things created a framework to keep private aircrafts’ flight data from being made public. This came after several celebrities’ jet movements started being tracked by third-party social media accounts, like the jets of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Kylie Jenner, Kim Kardashian, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Image: GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN - MARCH 30: Billionaire businessman Elon Musk arrives for a town hall wearing a cheesehead hat at the KI Convention Center on March 30, 2025 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The town hall is being held in front of the state’s high-profile Supreme Court election between Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel, who has been financially backed by Musk and endorsed by President Donald Trump, and Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
