I think it’s because of the way he directly engages with his followers on social media. There aren’t many (any?) ultra-wealthy people who do that. It’s not just “he’s saying what I’m thinking and since he’s rich that validates my gross views,” but “he’s having a conversation about what I’m thinking.”
Even Trump generally won’t do anything past a retweet. Elon responds. That’s a big deal.
What’s the current result? I can’t see it, presumably because I don’t have an account.
Elmo becomes more of a laughingstock every day. After being challenged on the banning of a bunch of journalists when Elmo showed up on Twitter Spaces – including by some of the journalists themselves, Elmo just abruptly dropped out of the conversation. Shortly after, Twitter Spaces was gone. And now Elmo is saying it’ll be back up tomorrow, and they’re just fixing a “Legacy bug”. Funny how that “bug” showed up immediately after Elmo was called out as a liar on Spaces. He really does have the maturity of a six-year-old, and just about as much foresight about the consequences of his actions.
And as I pointed out in my previous post, all this fuss and drama was completely unnecessary. There is a simple technical solution offered by the FAA that would prevent the general public from being able to track Elmo’s plane by simply anonymizing the ID sent out by the ADS-B transmitter. With a modicum of common sense and just asking the right people a few questions, Elmo could have avoided all this drama.
But Elmo has to be Elmo. If he had any common sense, he wouldn’t have bought Twitter and certainly wouldn’t be trying to run it.
FWIW, I like to use Flight Tracker app, and yesterday a jet took off from the GA airport, and its ID was “blocked”. I’d never seen that, I’ve seen “unavailable”. Even military flights have their data available. Was Elmo in Mesa? 
According to this site, his plane has been in San Jose for the last 14 hours, as I post this at 9:30 EST, 12/16/22.
FlightAware and a few other places I checked wouldn’t show the plane’s location, so Elmo seems to have made a partial attempt to block trackers, but apparently doesn’t know about @wolfpup’s advice. I found this site through Reddit.
While he’s banning journalists, he’s unbanned a Doctor Robert Malone who is an anti-vaccine guy and who has started a thread on twitter calling for the prosecution of Dr. Fauci. I cannot believe the responses.
Usually when I see an unpopular opinion on twitter, all the responses are arguing against the opinion, but not this time. When I stopped reading that thread, I had not seen one single defense of Dr. Fauci. In fact, most called for not the prosecution, but the execution of Dr. Fauci.
What a cesspool that website has become. It’s infuriating to me. When there wasn’t much activity on the dope or I was having issues connecting to it, twitter was a great second place to go.
And the day before was in Austin, Texas (I checked, just for fun – and no one needs Elonjet to do it). Until Elmo gets a private ICAO address, he can make all the blocking requests he wants, and suspend all the posters he wants, his plane will still be trackable. He’s a moron.
Where is the time stamp? I don’t see it. (I’ve never used the site.)
Edit: I closed the frame and entered the N-number into the search box. A yellow box came up saying ‘No match found in this view: n628ts’, but the aircraft information and the map were the same as in the previous link.
The FAA administers a program called LADD that allows aircraft owners to ask that their ADSB data not be shared to the public by the FAA. The major flight tracking tools (Flight Aware, Flight Radar 24, others) filter their data using that list as a courtesy, but participation is not required if they are using data aggregated from non-FCC sources.
ADSBXchange.com does not participate, nor is the information broadcast from the aircraft altered in any way. It can still be received by anyone with interest.
Probably not worth bumping the IMHO thread(s) about this, but it seems like the twitter employees who took the severance and left made the right choice.
Although they may only get any of that severance after some court battles though.
Right. Which is why Elmo should have used the PIA program, also administered by the FAA.
…although that PIA program is not foolproof. Takes one spotter on the ground to associate the new ICAO code to the tail numbers and we’re back to tracking again. And Elmo could not fly overseas with that new code, nor could prosecute change it for a new private code more than once every 60 days.
I’d never seen the site myself before this morning. In the column on the left, under “Signal” are two entries, Last Pos and Last Seen. They don’t show a time stamp, simply the interval, in hours, since those events.
I would think PIA would be plenty good enough for Elmo’s purposes. It would take a pretty determined group to have a spotter on the ground at just the right time and place and associate it with a transmitted ICAO code. And even so, aren’t the big trackers getting their info automatically from public aviation registries? The temporary new ICAO code would have to be hand-coded into the tracker’s database. I mean, it all works in principle, but it implies a level of effort that doesn’t seem remotely realistic, and I doubt that anyone really has that level of interest in where Elmo goes.
In contrast, at the present time, notwithstanding Elmo’s attempts to block tracking information, anyone can track his plane at any time with a few mouse clicks, causing Elmo to have tremendous hissy fits.
Nothing’s really going to be good enough for him
He owns a social media company but doesn’t understand a basic tenet of modern life - it is difficult to craft your desired public social media presence without a lot of work, usually by a whole team of professionals. Maybe impossible, even with such a team. He wants to project a certain image (real life Tony Stark or whatever) but fucks that up by getting personally involved.
There’s a lot of ways wealthy people are shielded from the harsh light of reality, particularly by the coterie of sycophants that surround them. But social media totally erases that shield if one engages directly. Sure, you can just say “bot, bot, bot” all day, but nobody but the devoted fanboys are fooled.
If he really wanted to make it harder to track his private jet, he should hire people to take care of that. But that would burst the bubble of personal hyper-competence he has built for himself. It’s a choice he can’t handle - either admitting he needs more competent people to handle some things or accepting his public image will take a hit if he does things personally and shows he is not, in fact, all that personally intelligent or capable.
I’ve seen the ADSBx crew do it. Given the limited number of airports he flies to, it wouldn’t take a lot. I have no doubt the big commercial tracking sites would do nothing with the info since the already honor the LADD list, but ADSBx would be on that in a second.
But SpaceX! He’s gonna make us all rocket men to Mars! Pew! Pew! Bench!
FWIW, Flightradar24 has info on the plane including a picture, but no indication of where it is.
Make Mars Great Again!
Mars Shall Rise Again!
This afternoon, in fact!
Counting down to an attempt to rebrand it as Ares…