GRUENHEIDE, GERMANY – SEPTEMBER 03: Tesla head Elon Musk talks to the press as he arrives to to have … [+]
Elon Musk has continued to court controversy in his new role as Twitter’s owner by reneging on an earlier promise to allow an account sharing publicly available flight data for his private jet to keep posting. His concern might be understandable, but in this case it’s well outweighed by the public interest involved.
Musk suddenly changed his mind this week about the status of the popular @ElonJet account, suspending it along with similar accounts that follow the travels of other celebrity aircraft connected to Mark Zuckerberg and Oprah Winfrey.
“Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation,” Musk posted on Twitter Wednesday. “This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.”
The about-face appears to be precipitated by an incident in which a car carrying Musk’s young son “was followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood,” Musk wrote.
The narrative took a weirder turn later in the week when Musk went a step further and suspended the accounts of a number of journalists, apparently because they had written about ElonJet.
The Tesla and SpaceX founder then posted a pair of polls on Twitter asking users how long the journalists’ accounts should be suspended. The majority of votes indicated the accounts should be reinstated immediately and Musk said he would comply.
There’s some room for debate about whether or not posting publicly-available flight data amounts to doxxing, and what even counts as doxxing.
But what’s clear is that Musk is running up against the long-running tension in America and other western societies between individual rights to privacy and the public’s right to know. In the US in particular, the First Amendment to the Constitution offers strong protections to journalists covering public figures and Musk has gone out of his way to live a public life, constantly elevating and leveraging his own profile for the benefit of his companies and doing so quite successfully.
The price he and other celebrities have always had to pay is that living life as a public figure can be quite scary. Stalking and harassing anyone, famous or not, is wrong and should be condemned and prosecuted under law. But reporting the movements of a public figure in public spaces (US and international airspace counts), especially via publicly available data is journalism, not harassment.
There are some gray areas plied by the likes of the paparazzi where journalism begins to look more like harassment, at least from an ethical perspective, but the courts have typically protected even their rights to report on public figures and @ElonJet certainly doesn’t fall into this gray area. Again, the accounts are simply taking info from one public source and posting it elsewhere.
Of course, Musk also has pretty broad leverage to ban such reporting from going out on his platform. But I don’t see his plans to sue anyone over tracking him going anywhere.
Musk’s Oversized Footprint
In addition to the fact that Musk is one of the most famous and powerful individuals on the planet, there’s another reason that tracking his private jet mileage is totally legitimate and in the public interest: carbon emissions
Musk built a fortune selling a vision of a future in which drivers can have it all: a luxury car that is fast, fun and environmentally friendly. Tesla owes its success to a quality product and Musk’s savvy, but these are not the only ingredients that have driven sales, the stock price and Musk’s wealth.
Tax credits, loans and other incentives have helped prop Tesla up for years, all in the name of reducing America’s carbon footprint.
Again, there is a hidden cost to all this taxpayer-funded assistance that Musk has to pay: increased scrutiny of his personal carbon footprint.
In addition to following Musk’s movements, trackers like @ElonJet also provide a sort of gauge for hypocrisy. Private jet flights are among the most significant offenders when it comes to carbon emissions on a per person basis. Musk can erase a chunk of the gains in terms of carbon output that Tesla has provided (and that US taxpayers invested in) by taking a single 10-minute flight from Starbase to Austin.
Elon Musk is smart. He is a visionary who works hard and will be remembered for centuries. But we are not required to avert our eyes from him in public.
Elon Musk is not a king, except perhaps on Twitter.
