The right of billionaires to travel in secrecy is a niche concern, to say the least.
True enough. However, when your paper employs a "wealth reporter" you gotta write about something, don't you?
I have to admit that, zillionaires or not, I sort of sympathize with them on this issue. Sometimes you just want to go somewhere and not have the whole world know about it. Still, as the story points out, you can always travel by charter jet, which allows all the privacy you want and almost all of the luxury of a private jet. So there's no reason to feel too sorry for all these hotly pursued celebrities.
They can also fly commercial.
Preferably coach. Nobody would ever suspect...
I have no sympathy at all. Musk has done everything in his power to make himself the kind of celebrity that gets followed around and whose face is known by as many people as possible. Now he’s upset because he only wanted the good stuff that comes with that, not the bad stuff. Too bad.
The stuff regarding the ability to track the comings and goings of privately owned airplanes is an example of The Streisand Effect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Smart guy that he is, Musk had to know about this. I suspect he loves the attention and his complaints are just him trying to get more. If he was born in the US I’m sure he would run for President. It mist upset him that he can’t.
I agree. Zero sympathy. For one, all that is known is at which airport the jet will land. Being that his highness will be picked up on the tarmac I think any security threats are minimal and even the paparazzi will be kept at bay. And from the airport the final destination is not known. Also, the whole just hire a private charter jet on which you can fly anonymously if you are genuinely concerned option.
And my guess is that Musk simply used it as an excuse to get uppity journalists off Twitter.
Your final point is exactly right. They have choices and the money to pay for them.
I want a journalist to ask Elmo if he has the power to find out where any Tesla car is at any given time. The answer is obviously yes - if he wanted to, he'd just fire people until someone said yes.
Then ask him how users can opt-out of that.
Fucking snowflake billionaires.
+1
With Tesla trading at 126 today, you gotta wonder how much carnage investors and the board will put up with before they do something.
(The $44B price for Twitter is nothing compared to the loss in Tesla stock.)
That’s the thing with Tesla’s. You own the car but Tesla owns the software and can do whatever they want to with it. Piss off Elon and you just might find out the Tesla Supercharger network no longer recognizes your car.
Zillionaires deserve to be left alone to the degree they leave us alone. But if you're a social media titan, among the select few who have done the most to destroy the right to privacy that most of us once took or granted, you deserve whatever's coming your way.
Not to mention, in Musk's case, he's the owner of Tesla, a company that knows the location of every Tesla owner on the planet. If he's upset that somebody else might know the last airport he flew into, tough luck.
Are the locations of of every Tesla owner posted somewhere? Or even trackable to people other than owners?
They are traceable by Tesla. Elon released details of how a NYT’s writer drove a Tesla after the writer’s article pissed Elon off.
Got it. But I'd say there's a difference between tracking data being housed in corporate servers nd the dat being published with the intention to reveal it to the public. Any company with any trace of technology has personal info of their customers.
The tracking data *is* public. You can find it here...
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/
What has he done to destroy our right to privacy?
Elon has demonstrated repeatedly he has no problem with doxing anyone who crosses him.
Simon Weiss on Mastodon: There are many legitimate reasons to track Elon Musk’s flight coordinates, for example to offer him ads more relevant to his interests
+1
+100
I made a metaphor once to explain why zillionaires need a modicum of overwatch...
Remember in Ghostbusters II when the Statue of Liberty was turned into a ghost fighting Mecha? That's what zillionaires are: giant, metallic, unfeeling simulations of humans striding through the world and no matter how careful they are, some people, some ecosystems, some political discourses will be damaged - they can't help it. Malicious or not. If they wish to avoid this circumstance, their gravity, their might, their wealth need to be shed. The same for those on the other side of the scale: their might is so slight they are regularly ignored, their voices so weak they are unheard, their plights invisible, except at scale when they are seen as statistics.
This is the world we live in.
You can bet most billionaires are happy about the tracking. They like the attention.
In Elon Musk's case, I'll bet the real issue is that tracking him in the past few months shows that he's spending all his time on Twitter, and not on Tesla. To some degree, maybe small, that was probably hurting Tesla stock. I'll bet the Tesla board told him: give up the plane or give up the tracking.
So, how does private flight information become public in the first place? Can't zillionaires keep the registration of their jets private?
The jet isn’t actually owned by Musk. It’s owned by Falcon Landing LLC which is a shell corporation owned by SpaceX, which owns 3 corporate jets. I assume most zillionaires own their jets this way and because they aren’t famous like Musk, people don’t go out of their way to find the information out and post it online.
The jet Musk apparent flies is a Gulfstream 650. The other two are Gulfstream 550’s. I don’t know how it is known that he flies the 650 but I guess it’s just assumed he flies the one that costs the most. I suppose he could get around unfollowed if he flew one of the other jets occasionally.
All jet and plane locations are public at all times. Mainly so they don't collide into each other accidentally mid-flight, which for various reasons is considered to be bad for everyone.
All jet and plane locations are public at all times.
Sure. I assumed that. Hence my question how do we know which jet is registered to Musk and/or carrying him as a passenger? Seems like it shouldn't be that hard to block prying eyes.
Because all jets are registered by law. The FAA not only needs to know that a jet is in the air, it needs to know which jet is in the air, for a variety of reasons, including knowing with whom they are communicating. Every jet is identifiable.
We don't know who is in the jet in question, but we do know who owns it. Hence the ability to retain anonymity with a charter.
With enough effort, he might be able to bury the paperwork associating him with his rented or borrowed jet. But as others have pointed out, the locations of all planes are publicly broadcast to everyone, because colliding with it would be Extremely Bad for both planes as well as anyone underneath where they crash. There's no way around that in an open economy where anybody can acquire a plane without governmental permission. (North Korea probably can hide where its planes fly over its own airspace.)
And as long as Elon keeps publicly appearing in various places and also keeps not flying commercial, it wouldn't take long to figure out which private plane is his: it would be the one that landed and took off from the same set of places on the same set of days that Elon himself was traveling to/from.
Elon could charter a jet. Everyone who checked would see who owned the charter jet, but not who was chartering it.
Lots of rich people exist that we never hear anything about. According to Wikipedia, there are currently 614 billionaires in the US today. How many of them can you name off the top of your head? (My guess is fewer than 50.)
The other ones seem to make obscurity work for them. Elon purposefully sought out the public spotlight and succeeded; now he's annoyed by what that spotlight is shining on. At any point, he could drop out of the spotlight, like most of his fellow billionaires. He constantly chooses not to every day when he logs onto Twitter. Fck his desire for privacy only when it suits him - he has enough money to console him for his loss.
Even if he hadn't sought out fame, it would be hard to avoid since "world's richest person" inevitably comes in for a lot of PR, welcome or not.
I guess. Someone who really desired to be left alone probably wouldn't be posting on Twitter a dozen times a day though. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates pretty high up in the rankings too, yet we go entire months without hearing about either man's location or views in the news. Weird how seeking out attention leads to more unwanted attention!
I didn't even know who Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin or Steve Ballmer were until I looked at the list, much less heard anything about any of them this year (or apparently any year that I've been alive)... yet they're in the Top 10 billionaires too. Again, so weird that people that don't yell "look at me!" all the time aren't looked at all the time!
One used to hear about Ellison when he got fined for flying his jet into Orange County after the 11:00 pm noise curfew on landings.
Musk is rich enough that if he wanted to he could conceal his own location by just having his jet spend time flying around without him. If Musk's jet is in Bora Bora, the assumption is that Musk is in Bora Bora, but there's no reason why that has to be true.