What happened in the pursuit incident Musk cited to ban @ElonJet

The time and location of the confrontation cast doubt on Musk’s claim that the account posted real-time “kill coordinates” that threatened his family and led to the confrontation. Police have said little about the incident, but said they have not yet found a connection between the confrontation and the plane’s tracking account.

The incident last week prompted a major rewrite of Twitter’s rules and the suspension of half a dozen journalists’ accounts, which were condemned by free speech advocates. It also highlights how Musk’s personal concerns could affect his management of a social media platform used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

As the sole owner of Twitter, Musk can dictate policy as he sees fit. Musk dissolved Twitter’s board of directors, which among other companies may have influenced the company’s response to the incident, as well as its longtime “trust and safety” committee that advised the social media platform on its policies. No Twitter executive has the authority to balance Musk’s directives.

The incident happened in South Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, on Tuesday around 9:45 p.m. South Pasadena police were called to the gas station, according to the business manager, but made no arrests. South Pasadena police did not respond to requests for comment.

The Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement Thursday that its threat management unit was in contact with Musk’s representatives and the security team, but that no crime reports had been filed. Police did not respond to requests for updates Sunday.

Using a video of the incident that Musk posted on Twitter, The Washington Post identified the owner of the car involved and then the driver shown in the video, who had rented it through the Turo car-sharing service.

The renter of the car, Brandon Collado, confirmed in interviews with The Post that he was the man shown in the video. He also provided The Post with videos he took of Musk’s bodyguard that matched the one Musk posted on Twitter.

In conversations with The Post, Collado admitted to having an interest in Musk and the mother of two of Musk’s children, the musician known as Grimes, whose real name is Claire Elise Boucher. Boucher lives in a house near the gas station.

In his communication with The Post, Collado, who said he was an Uber Eats driver, also made several strange and unsupported claims, including that he believed Boucher was sending him coded messages through her Instagram posts; that Musk monitored his location in real time; and that Musk could control Uber Eats to block him from receiving delivery orders. He said he was in Boucher’s neighborhood to work for Uber Eats.

Musk did not respond to email and tweet requests from The Post to discuss the incident. Boucher did not respond to requests for comment.

Due to the concentration of high-profile figures, stalking is a widespread problem in Los Angeles. After 21-year-old actress Rebecca Schaeffer was shot to death in the driveway of her Los Angeles home in 1989 by an obsessed fan, the city enacted several measures designed to protect the targets of stalking, such as restrictions on public access to address information from the California driving records and a specialist police unit focused on the problem.

However, in 2015, actress and singer Selena Gomez was forced to move out of her $4.5 million home because of a relentless stalker. Actress Sandra Bullock recently opened up about the trauma and PTSD she experienced after a stalker broke into her home in 2014. In 2012, a man accused of stalking actress Halle Berry was sentenced to more than a year in prison.

Boucher was also the subject of persecution. In 2018, she obtained a restraining order against a man named Raymond Barajas after he showed up at her home and said he thought she was secretly communicating with him through her music.

Mark Madero, a Los Angeles police detective with the department that investigates high-profile stalking cases, told The Post that the department was investigating a man who was accused of stalking Boucher. After the encounter at the gas station, Musk’s security team alerted police, who began investigating whether the man in the video was the same alleged stalker, Madero said. He said the unit has yet to make a decision and is still investigating.

Madero said the man’s video suggests he made efforts to hide his identity, including wearing gloves and partially covering his face. But he said his department has no evidence to suggest the man police are investigating used the account to track a plane. He noted that stalkers typically use “open source search of a targeted person,” adding: “Nothing would surprise me.”

Musk tweeted Thursday that the journalists were “aware of the vicious stalker and yet located my family in real time.” He did not say which journalists were in question and did not provide any evidence. The Post didn’t know about the incident until Musk tweeted about it. Browsing the internet found no stalker news. A volunteer from investigative journalism group Bellingcat used the video posted by Musk to locate the incident to the gas station.

Musk’s plane landed in Los Angeles last Monday, Dec. 12, after a flight from Oakland, the @ElonJet account said, citing flight information known as ADS-B data that is legally and routinely collected by aviation enthusiasts and published on public websites such as the ADS-B Exchange.

Musk was in San Francisco the night before and was booed on stage at Dave Chappelle’s comedy show. Three days earlier he had posted another photo of San Francisco to his 2-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii, whom Musk calls “X.”

The incident happened at the gas station on Tuesday, Dec. 13, approximately 15 minutes before the station closed, according to its manager, Daniel Santiago, who was working that night. Santiago said he was surprised when the car driven by Collado pulled into the Arco station and into the space next to Santiago’s car, which is not a normal customer parking space.

He said the incident was caught on the gas station’s security camera and that the footage was turned over to South Pasadena police on Thursday.

According to a video of the incident that Musk posted, the member of Musk’s security team confronted Collado, who was sitting in the car wearing gloves and a hood. “Yeah, pretty sure. Got you,” the member of Musk’s security team can be heard saying in the video.

It is not known what happened between the two men before they arrived at the gas station. There was no indication in the videos shared with The Post that Musk’s children were present.

Collado claims he was making an Uber Eats delivery and visiting a friend when he stopped at the gas station and said Musk’s security guard confronted him for no reason. Collado said he believed Musk was tracking his location in real time.

Two videos of the altercation shared by Collado with The Post show him getting out of his rental car and standing in front of a Toyota driven by a Musk security officer.

Shortly after the incident, South Pasadena police officers arrived at the gas station, questioned Collado and told him they would file a report, Collado said.

On Saturday, Collado tweeted at Musk: “I am the person in this video… You have ties to me and have been stalking me and my family for over a year.” Collado said he had not been contacted by police as of Tuesday night.

After the gas station incident, Twitter changed its rules to prohibit the sharing of all “live location information,” including links to other websites that note “travel routes, actual physical location, or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location , regardless of whether that information is publicly available.’

It also suspended @ElonJet, its operator Jack Sweeney, and dozens of its other aircraft tracking accounts that monitored the public movements of sports teams, political figures and Russian oligarchs.

Twitter also suspended journalists from The Post, New York Times, CNN and other news organizations who covered the @ElonJet shutdowns. Two former employees who have been in contact with Twitter staff told The Post that the suspensions were suddenly marked as “Elon’s direction.”

Musk’s representatives previously asked the Federal Aviation Administration to limit the sharing of certain flight records using a program known as Aircraft Data Display Restrictions. But such requests do not interfere with the transmission of ADS-B data, which comes from unencrypted signals that are broadcast from aircraft and that anyone with the proper equipment can receive from the ground.

On Sunday, Musk posted videos showing himself attending the World Cup match in Qatar. When some of the crowd shared photos showing Musk’s presence, Twitter users noted that the details could be classified as real-time location information, the kind Musk has labeled “kill coordinates,” and were no longer allowed. .

Alice Crites contributed to this report.