Pop empress Taylor Swift sold one of her private jets last month amid an effort to silence a student tracking her flights.
According to recently revealed documents, Ms. Swift sold her plane to Missouri car insurance company CarShield on Jan. 30. The price of the sale was not listed; the plane was bought in 2011 for around $40 million.
Although she parted with the Dassault Falcon 900LX, Ms. Swift still uses the larger Dassault Falcon 7X to shuttle among concerts around the world. She will likely be traveling in the plane this weekend after her Sunday show in Japan to make it back to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl, where her boyfriend, Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs, awaits.
The sale comes after Ms. Swift issued a cease and desist letter in December to Florida student Jack Sweeney, who tracks the flights of several notable celebrities, including arguably the biggest star on the planet.
Despite Mr. Sweeney publishing publicly available data, lawyers for Ms. Swift claimed his tracking has facilitated harassment against the pop star. In their letter, they also said there’s no “legitimate reason” for Mr. Sweeney to publish this information outside of wanting to “exert domination and control.”
Mr. Sweeney has been on the defense from billionaires before. In late 2022, he was banned from Twitter for publishing the flight coordinates of Elon Musk, who had just bought the platform. Mr. Musk made many of the same claims as Ms. Swift’s lawyers, claiming that Mr. Sweeney was publishing “assassination coordinates.”
In a Tuesday X post, Mr. Musk praised Ms. Swift’s decision to issue a letter, stating she’s “right to be concerned.”
Meanwhile, Ms. Swift has received criticism from climate activists for her carbon footprint, which they say is enlarged due to her constant flights on private jets. According to climate marketing and data analysis group Yard, she flew 170 times from January to July 2022.
• Vaughn Cockayne can be reached at vcockayne@washingtontimes.com.
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