Republished with full copyright permissions from The San Francisco Press.

The rivalry between Elon Musk, the visionary entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, and Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, has taken a new turn. With the launch of Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, Zuckerberg seems unfazed by potentially provoking Musk further. As the platform gains rapid popularity, fueled by existing user data and Twitter’s decline, questions arise about the source of Threads’ success. Is intellectual property theft and talent acquisition behind Threads’ rapid rise? Let’s take a closer look at the ongoing feud and the recent developments surrounding Elon Musk’s private jet tracking.

Elon Musk has been known for his outspoken nature on Twitter, where he often shares his unfiltered thoughts and opinions. However, the platform’s current state and financial struggles have led to its diminished effectiveness. In contrast, Meta’s Threads arrived on the scene, attracting millions of new users in no time. Musk, already skeptical of Meta and its intentions, suspects foul play behind Threads’ rapid success. Questions about intellectual property theft and the hiring of former Musk employees who were let go or driven away have been raised.

To add fuel to the fire, 20-year-old Florida college student Jack Sweeney, notorious for his ElonJet Twitter account which utilized publicly available data to track Musk’s private jet location, swiftly established an account named “elonmusksjet” on Threads soon after Meta’s platform went live. This move came more than two months after Musk acquired Twitter and permanently suspended Sweeney’s ElonJet account, alleging security concerns related to the real-time exposure of his and his family’s whereabouts.

Despite Musk’s efforts to curtail the tracking of his private jet, the Threads account managed to track one of his recent flights from Austin to Brownsville, Texas, just three days ago. The persistence of the account raises questions about the effectiveness of Musk’s actions and adds tensions to the already escalating feud between the two billionaires.