Congress Just Took Away Our Ability to Track Billionaires’ Private Jets

It looks like Taylor Swift—and, with her, so many other celebrities—can sigh in relief. From now on, nobody will be able to see how much celebrities abuse the environment with their private jet-related CO2 emissions. And for that, we have Congress to thank.

An amendment in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization bill—which was initially introduced last June and signed into law on May 16 by President Biden—will make it extremely difficult, borderline impossible, to track private jet activity because private jet owners will now be able to make their registration information anonymous, Gizmodo reports.

Before the law was passed, anybody could look up celebrities and their private jet activity on the FAA civil registry. Now, that registry will become private for those private jet owners who ask for their identifying information to be hidden, making it almost impossible for folks to intersect that data with radar mapping. Ultimately, that has allowed committed planespotters to figure out where and when celebrities travel aboard their private CO2-emitting planes.

Among those planespotting enthusiasts is Jack Sweeney, the college student and planespotter whose Twitter profile is famous for tracking celebrity jet activity. Thanks to his efforts, Sweeney has been in the public eye for a while now, so much so that his activity has grabbed the attention of many private jet-abusing celebrities, including Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.

In 2020, Musk threatened to sue Sweeney after he created his since–famous Twitter profile and even proceeded to shadowban him and ban him after purchasing Twitter in 2022. However, Sweeney’s planespotting profile has since been allowed back on X.

Swift, instead, famously served Sweeney with a cease-and-desist letter after he published a compilation video of Swift’s private jet flights in 2023. According to that data, she flew 178,000 miles in that period, which is a lot, especially regarding CO2 emissions. We’re talking 1,200 tons of it, as Sweeney reported.

With the new law passing, Sweeney likely isn’t pleased right now. Don’t worry—we asked him, and should he get back to us in a timely fashion, we’ll let you know.

However, this doesn’t mean that all hope’s lost in determining which celebrities are most at fault because of their private jet usage. As Thrillist just reported, a new study recently analyzed the private jet activity of celebrities between 2023 and 2024 and managed to rank them based on their CO2 emissions.

According to the study, Pitbull is the “winner,” sitting at the top of the ranking with 4,549 metric tons of CO2 in 396 flights. Travis Scott emitted 3,760 metric tons of CO2 in 203 flights, while Kim Kardashian emitted 3,204 metric tons of CO2 in 210 flights. Taylor Swift came in at number 13 with 1,055 metric tons of CO2 emitted in 133 flights. You can read more about the worst celebrities for their private jet CO2 emissions here.